A trip to Night City, 150 hours to complete and no gwent: data miners have revealed what The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt could have become

A group of modders have released the first volume of their large-scale project What Lies Unseen, designed to document the development of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and how the cult CD Projekt Red action role-playing game changed along the way to release.

Image source: CD Projekt Red

The first volume of What Lies Unseen stretches over 584 pages and is dedicated to the original version of the plot of The Witcher 3 from 2012 (that is, even before the announcement). Blogger xLetalis highlighted the changes in a three-hour video.

Major changes in The Witcher 3 (2012) compared to the release version:

• The game’s subtitle was not Wild Hunt, but A Time of Sword and Ax;
• The plot involved much more travel between Velen, Skellige and Novigrad, and many characters participated in the story over several acts;
• Choosing Yennefer/Triss would mean that there would be no second sorceress in the last third of the game;
• Iorveth from The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings had a large role in the game;
• In Novigrad they wanted to implement a multi-stage robbery with the participation of allies, as in the episode with the siege of Kaer Morhen;
• The story of the Bloody Baron looked completely different and continued until the late stages of the game;
• The endings were more ambiguous and melancholy;
• The game was supposed to have a targeting system for vulnerable points of monsters in the spirit of VATS from Fallout;
• Instead of gwent there were other mini-games – arm wrestling and poker from the first parts.

Conceptually, the story did not change much, but it included much more events – a significant portion of side content used to be part of the plot. Completing that version of the game (namely the main narrative) took 150 hours.

What Lies Unseen includes descriptions of locations and scenes, early dialogue sketches, concept art and prototypes of some of the models still available for viewing in the official REDKit mod editor for The Witcher 3.

Information for What Lies Unseen was initially collected from interviews and leaks, but with the release in 2024, a breakthrough occurred – REDKit included “almost every line of text written for The Witcher 3 from the earliest to the last point of development.”

The What Lies Unseen project is the result of the work of modders Glassfish, Ferroxius, Moonknight, Crygreg. The release dates for the next volumes (they are dedicated to the 2013 and 2014 versions of The Witcher 3, as well as additions to the game) have not been specified.