Here’s why CD Projekt Red’s games have brilliant side quests

CD Projekt Red says it turns down “over 90 per cent” of its team’s side quest pitches.

Talking at GDC this week, lead quest designer Paweł Sasko said in a presentation that even a “good designer” has just 10 per cent of their ideas accepted.

“If someone has 10 per cent, this is probably one of the best people we have in the team,” Sasko explained.

“So what I do with our designers, I’m like, okay here’s the list of genres. Here’s a list of the themes that I want you to work with. Write me pitches. And then they write, yeah, five, 10, 20 a day. Basically, an excellent pitch is like four sentences of like: That’s the pitch,” Sasko said, as transcribed by PC Gamer.

“No one, no artist has only great ideas. We all have shit ideas and tons of them, we pick just a top five per cent,” Sasko added.

Interestingly, it’s not merely the quests with the biggest budgets that impress fans, either; according to Sasko, “you can make so many amazing things with clever ideas, with working with limitations” and some of the most popular quests had “the smallest budgets”.

In other GDC news, yesterday Velan Studios’ director of marketing, Josh Harrison, had one recommendation for studios looking to close down or “sunset” a live-service game: “make a private hosted version of your game”.

Talking at GDC, Harrison said that offering a standalone version of its now shuttered live-service project, Knockout City, was “the single biggest thing [Velan] did to impact the positive reception of the sunset” and not only did it garner positivity from the press and community alike, but it also “keeps the game that everybody worked so hard on alive forever”.

Last month, Anna Megill has joined CD Projekt Red as lead writer on the studio’s upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 sequel, codenamed Project Orion.

Megill has over 20 years of experience in the industry, and has previously worked on games such as Control and the upcoming Fable reboot. She will be joined on the narrative team by Alexander Freed, whose previous work includes serving as lead writer on Star Wars: The Old Republic at BioWare.