CD Projekt RED on Killing Your Favorite Features

During a speech at GDC Europe 2012, CD Projekt RED’s gameplay producer Marek Ziemak and lead gameplay designer Maciej Szczesnik talked about the process the studio uses to decide what features to cut in development. The example they use is a feature cut from The Witcher 2, namely dual-wielding:

CD Projekt Red uses a set of internal documents that the studio’s employees all have access to. Using these documents, developers can describe their features and the rest of the staff evaluates them. In some cases, staffers even apply numerical values to a proposed feature, with the final “score” affecting the likelihood that a feature will make it into the game. The overarching idea is to fully analyze the risk of a feature and the consequences of implementing it.

At one point, for example, the studio considered adding dual sword combat to The Witcher 2. “We actually wanted to do it in Witcher 2. We wanted to implement this feature, but we started thinking about the consequences of the decision,” said Ziemak. Adding a new form of combat would “look great,” said Ziemak, “but of course, the secondary consequence of this is that we would get really complex animations, and we only had one stuntman, so that would be probably really hard to develop.” After analyzing these consequences, the feature was canned.