The Witcher 3 Isn't Perfect, Says Its Own Lead Writer

Marcin Blacha co-wrote The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. He knows every seam, every narrative shortcut, every compromise the production had to make. Now VP of Narrative at CD Projekt Red, he didn't wait to be asked before stating plainly that the game falls far short of perfection. This kind of position, coming from inside the studio, deserves scrutiny.

A Creator Who Refuses to Worship His Own Work

It's rare for a studio executive to publicly reject the mythic status of their flagship title. Blacha does it anyway, without hedging: The Witcher 3 is not a monument. This isn't surface-level false modesty—it's a clear-eyed assessment of a game released eleven years ago that carried real structural flaws from day one.

CD Projekt Red's RPG racked up over 800 awards at launch in 2015 and continued selling massively for a decade, but its weaknesses were always there: a clunky interface, a combat system that never won over players accustomed to snappier action-RPGs, and sometimes incoherent progression management. What Blacha is saying is that the studio knew about these problems—and still does.

What It Means for The Witcher 4

Blacha's statement isn't nostalgic self-flagellation. It comes as CD Projekt Red is deep in development on The Witcher 4, whose first public reveal confirmed a major protagonist shift—Ciri replaces Geralt at the narrative center. In this context, publicly owning the third game's limitations is significant: it's a way to justify the departures ahead.

A studio wrapped in the perfection of its past would struggle to defend radical choices. By saying Witcher 3 had limits, Blacha frees the team from the obligation to replicate exactly what worked—and opens the door to rewriting the rules of the franchise.

The Witcher 3 established narrative standards that games like Baldur's Gate 3 (Larian Studios, 2023) and Cyberpunk 2077 in its post-2.0 versions had to manage as unavoidable comparison points. But those standards also froze expectations: moral quest consequences, branching dialogue, coherent world-building. Any departure reads as regression.

Blacha seems intent on desacralizing this template before The Witcher 4 launches, to keep the game from being judged solely against a predecessor he considers imperfect himself. It's a communication strategy and a genuine artistic conviction—and the two aren't mutually exclusive.

A Warning for Players Waiting for the Perfect Version

For anyone hoping The Witcher 4 would simply be Witcher 3 with better textures and tighter combat, this positioning sends a clear message. CD Projekt Red isn't trying to deliver the definitive version of what already existed. The studio is building something else—with the same narrative foundations, but unburdened by the exact shape of the past.

That's exactly what you'd expect from a studio that survived Cyberpunk 2077 and its gradual resurrection: the ability to learn from mistakes without self-immolation and without retreating into nostalgia. Blacha criticizing his own work eleven years later signals a studio that's matured—now it remains to be seen whether The Witcher 4 proves that maturity, or represents another oversized promise.