While a lot of the Witchery chatter so far this year has been about an extra Witcher 3 DLC rumoured to be in the works, one of the projects we know for sure CD Projekt have on the go is a remake of the first Witcher game. Ahead of the remake’s arrival, a key dev on the 2007 RPG has just finished a developer commentary run through it, which makes for a great way to pass some time between Witchery things.

Over the course of 26 episodes put up on YouTube over the past six months or so, Artur Ganszyniec’s worked his way through Gerry from the River’s run-in with the Order of the Flaming Rose. On the way, he’s told stories and pulled the curtain back based on his experiences working on the game as lead story designer, as well as taking in the action for the first time in about 20 years.

For example, early on in the first episode, he provides an intro of sorts to his role in making the game by saying the following:

The funny story is that when the game was originally conceived, Geralt of Rivia was not the main character. For the first few years of the production, you were supposed to play another Witcher, not Geralt. But that was before I joined CD Projekt. I joined CD Projekt at the beginning of 2006 and so I had the [opportunity] to take part in the in the most intensive part of the production, where the final game took shape. So, I was responsible at at the end for putting together the new version of the story, because when I came in there were old scripts [which were] not really useful at the moment and we had to craft the story basically from scratch.

Ganszyniec makes clear in the description of each episode that the commentary he’s offering is just one person’s perspective and might contain misrememberings, since he’s just going off how he remembers things as having happened. So, it’s well worth also digging up features like this one which offer recollections from other CD Projekt veterans if you want the most complete picture possible as to how the game came together.

Regardless, it’s certainly an intriguing watch or listen ahead of the aforementioned remake, which Ganszyniec noted that he hopes is good upon rolling the credits in the latest episode. That’s not to say he’ll have a hand in it – the developer’s LinkedIn profile denotes that he left CD Projekt in 2010 and is currently working as a consulting designer alongside lecturing on game design at the University of Lodz. That said, one of the things that brought his YouTube series to my attention today was Witcher 4 narrative director and CD Projekt veteran Philipp Weber retweeting a post about it which mentioned that Ganszyniec’s observations could be worth checking out if you’re curious about changes the remake might potentially enact.

If you fancy an RPSy blast from the past about the first Witcher game, which I played through a few years ago and dug despite its time-worn clunkiness in comparison to its siblings, you can also check out co-founderman Kieron Gillen’s review of the enhanced edition for Eurogamer back in the day.