The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt, the third entry of the series developed by CD Projekt Red, is a truly massive game that can keep players engaged for a very long time with its huge amount of content. As we already heard in the past months, the game was apparently going to be even more massive, with some story quests focused on the Wild Hunt getting cut for a variety of reasons. Content related to one of the more popular characters of the second entry of the series, the Scoia'tael Iorveth, has also been cut, and a few hours ago a member of the team commented on the matter.
In a post on the official The Witcher forums, CDPR's Philipp Webber has commented on the Iorveth focused content that was cut from the game. Apparently, this chunk of the story was a big part of it and it was not possible to recreate it in another quest once the decision to cut it was made.
I'd like to give some clarification for this discussion. Like our writers already mentioned a few months ago, Iorveth used to be part of the game. However, as time and development went on, this chunk of the story had to be cut for multiple reasons, but it was quite a big part of the game. At this time, it was simply not possible to "just" create another quest that would replace it and we had to finish and polish the rest of the game. It's perfectly natural that parts of the game are cut in development, and in this case it unfortunately hit a part that Iorveth had a big role in.
And yes, of course you can come up with many ways and ideas how to still cram him in there somehow, but that's not our way. If we do something like that, we do it right and we do the character justice. It's not easy to make decisions like that, so I hope you can respect that.
As The Witcher 3 is going to be Geralt's final adventure, the game was probably the last chance for players to see Iorveth again. While the decision made by the team is definitely understandable, it's still disappointing for those who chose the Iorveth story path in The Witcher 2 and have come to love the Scoia'tael and their cause.
Philipp Weber also took the time yesterday to comment on the soon to be released The Witcher 3 Blood and Wine expansion. According to the member of the team, Blood and Wine has been created as the finale of the whole The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt, so it will be better for players to experience it once they're done with the main story, apparently not just due to the high level requirement.
Technically the expansion can be started before finishing the game (after a certain part of the Novigrad story line), but it would be pretty hard to even try this, since the level requirement is quite high (of course the player can start a separate Blood and Wine game from "New Game" in the main menu whenever he wants).
Players will definitely have a nice experience if they play Blood and Wine after finishing the main game, since we created Blood and Wine not just as a last expansion, but also as a finale of the whole game that is The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. So you can look forward to nice things.
The Witcher 3 is now available in all regions on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The Blood and Wine expansion will next week on all formats and in all regions.
