In a recent interview with Edge magazine, Philipp Weber, a quest designer at CD Projekt Red, revealed an amusing anecdote from the early development of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. In their pursuit of realistic NPC daily routines, the development team overlooked how NPCs reacted to player actions, resulting in mothers panic-dropping their babies on the ground whenever danger arose.
Weber admitted in the interview that, during early development, the team believed players would scrutinize even small villages with just eight houses to determine whether the residents felt like real individuals or merely decorative "mannequins." This extreme attention to detail inadvertently caused significant development headaches.
The core issue lay in the NPC "fear response" system. Similar to most open-world games, villagers in The Witcher 3 were programmed to scatter when they saw the protagonist, Geralt, draw his sword or attack. However, this indiscriminate logic was also applied to mothers holding infants. For weeks, female NPCs would reflexively drop their children and flee upon being startled, creating absurd scenes. Weber recalled, "For those few weeks, women were just dropping their babies left and right."
To address this, CDPR later overhauled NPC behavior logic. Instead of assigning fixed routes to most villagers, they gave characters a set of available "interest points" (such as chopping wood or carpentry), allowing NPCs to choose how to move between them. Weber cited the example of Novigrad's port, where the team created up to 200 possible action positions for 50 sailors to ensure the scene remained lively and varied, even when all characters were active simultaneously.
Weber also noted that, with today's technology and experience, the development team could build a Witcher 3-style village with eight houses in approximately two hours.