Hey Choombas!
The Moderators got together and thought it would be cool to try and shine some light on one of our very favorite devs @Benzenzimmern (CDPR Quest Design Coordinator Philipp Weber).
We also collected some frequent questions or discussions on the forums related to quest design. He was gracious enough to give us his time and send us back some answers. Thanks to @Vattier for helping get it all set up, to Philipp for taking the time to chat, and to all of you for supplying the inspiration for the conversation.
Without further adieu, check it out:
Tell us about how you came to be a quest designer at CDPR.
I started out using the modding tool for The Witcher 2 called “Redkit” and created my mod “Lykaon”, which won a Redkit modding competition. I got a beautiful prize for it: a one-of-a-kind replica of Aerondight, the silver sword Geralt receives from the Lady of the Lake.
After that, I was contacted by Pawel “Banan” Panasiuk from CD Projekt Red, who asked me if I would be interested in applying as a level designer for The Witcher 3. Of course I was, so I prepared a level design test and had an interview with the company. Funny enough I wasn’t hired as a level designer, but as a quest designer instead, because I didn’t just want to build a level, but also added a story and characters to it.
Just a few weeks later I joined the company and started working on Wild Hunt.
How is modding different than quest design for a AAA game development company?
The biggest difference for me is that at CD Projekt Red I get to collaborate with lots of fantastic colleagues. When I was modding I was mostly doing things by myself (although I can’t forget to mention invaluable help by my girlfriend who did all the hard scripting for me. On top of that, there were other modders like “Tekoppar” who helped me with lots of tech aspects or Sardas, who created amazing art. I even had Gavin from “Miracle of Sound” voice Dandelion for a while, which was great!).
I have to say that doing things by myself gave me lots of freedom, but it’s nothing compared to all the great ideas that come out of working with other talented people.
Every time I get new dialogue, cinematics or art, it still amazes me how much their work can elevate the quests. On top of that, our QA team provides great help in finding issues with the quest and new ideas. When I was modding and working in a vacuum, it was easy to become blind to larger issues, so having someone with a critical eye watch over your work is incredibly helpful.
However, I sometimes still get to use my modding sensibilities and come up with a few new things that aren’t usually done by quest designers, even on Cyberpunk. So I think the modding spirit is still there deep inside!
How does the process of designing a quest work at CDPR?
It all starts with ideas. Contrary to what many people believe, having the ideas is actually the easiest part of the whole process. We usually write down hundreds of them as pitches and choose the best ones.
Usually a pitch for a quest is just half a page of text, but once it’s chosen, we turn it into a full written quest design that can have 10 pages or more.
The quest design can be compared to a screenplay without finished dialogue, since it’s basically the full quest, just for reading. We separate it into sections like “SCENE”, “EXPLORATION”, “PLAYSTYLES” so the reader can already see the major beats that the quest will have.
At this point we start our iteration process. The quest design is read by our writers, the Lead Quest Designer and directors, so they can all give feedback. But at this stage, we work the closest with our writers, who are assigned to the quest together with us so both can create the characters and story in this early form.
Once the design gets accepted, we move forward to the implementation stage, in which the quest designer builds the whole quest from start to finish in our tools, to create a very basic playable version. For this version, we also write simple “debug dialogue”. We give a vague outline how the dialogue could flow and what topics the characters talk about, but it’s not proper dialogue. As an example, we write everything in the third person.
“V greets Dex. She’s new to this, so she shows him lots of respect. What job does he have to offer?”
It’s important that we write our dialogue this way so the writers still have their freedom to be creative. Of course our debugs can also be on a very detailed level, but writing in third person gives it enough of a disconnect so the writer doesn’t feel like he’s subconsciously led to write dialogues in a certain way. It’s my job to create the best possible environment for my writers to create amazing stories, so I also like to adapt to the style of every writer I work with. Sometimes I write more detailed debug dialogues, and sometimes I am purposely rather vague.
From there on, we keep iterating the quest and giving it more detail, implementing gameplay features as they come in and we of course work with many different teams. As an example, I also have to talk to designers and artists about what locations, characters, gameplay features, vfx, sounds, etc. I need and put this information in a production tool we use, so each producer of a team can keep track of them. So it’s not just important to be creative as a quest designer, but we also have to be very organized.
If you want a more detailed version of this, you can actually check this talk I gave a few years ago in which I explain the process of working on “The Warble of a Smitten Knight”:
When we hear devs at CDPR talk about designing games, we often hear a lot about how it’s an iterative process. When do you start feeling confident that you’ve got a concept that is really going to work for a quest?
To be perfectly honest, it comes and goes. I often start really liking an idea at the start and work towards it, but once we add more detail and complications, that is when the flaws rear their ugly heads.
But throughout production, there are always these special moments when I start to “feel” my quest. When I can read final dialogue, when some great art comes in, I can hear the voice acting and especially when custom music is created for my quest. I still get goosebumps when I think back on hearing the theme of the Lady of the Lake in Blood and Wine for the first time in my quest after talking to our composer about it many months before.
True confidence in my quests usually comes only after they’ve been released to the public and I can see the actual feedback of thousands of people playing it.
I think it’s important to keep this critical distance from your work, because when we’re creating art, thinking that whatever I am making is always great usually leads to a bad result.
What makes a quest “good,” in your opinion?
Quests can be very different, so I’d say there’s also different qualities they can have. We thankfully don’t have a checklist that says that every single quest has to have particular things or a specific structure because I think this would really limit our creativity (we never say that “This is a fetch quest.” “This is an escort quest” or anything like this. Every quest just grows organically).
For me personally, it’s when a player can feel like he really went on his own journey. When this journey brought him to many exciting, but also emotional places that might make him think - and most importantly, if the player really feels like this is “his” story, based on decisions he made and relationships he created with our characters.
I often try to get a good mix in. When I play games, I’m a “story guy”, so that’s always the most important part for me. But I also enjoy coming up with interesting gameplay scenarios that maybe aren’t available in any other quest (this is where the modding background helps a lot!) because at the end of the day, most quests should also simply be fun to play!
How important is pacing when designing a quest?
It’s of course very important, and this is something where our leads and directors are excellent at pinpointing issues and their ideas to improve a quest. They play the whole game a lot, so they have a good feeling for how it should flow. Sometimes we might get caught up in our own quests, but the quest before that one is already very sad and doesn’t have a lot of gameplay, so following that up with a similar mood and gameplay structure might not be the best idea.
However, we also don’t “shoehorn in” gameplay if it doesn’t fit. Sometimes pacing-wise there might be too many scenes after another, but if it’s much better for the story, than we’d rather not have perfect pacing than to just add something in there for the sake of changing it up. But if we plan well, we can actually tell an interesting story, but still have different things going on to give it a brisk pacing.
How do you avoid the dreaded “fetch quest” when inherently all quests involve some amount of “go here, do X”?
When I started on The Witcher 3, we had a huge document with all ideas for quests. One of them was to find letters all over the world and you got a reward once you found them. It was rejected, and there was a comment there from our lead quest designer at the time, Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz: “We. Don’t. Do. Fetch. Quests!”
So of course it's always good to have these easy rules in mind, but I think it also just comes with experience. Our quests usually aren’t built around specific gameplay actions, but interesting stories - and sometimes you need to fetch something there, but if there’s more to the story than you probably also do five other things on the way, so the one part where you fetch something doesn’t feel bad.
The Moderators got together and thought it would be cool to try and shine some light on one of our very favorite devs @Benzenzimmern (CDPR Quest Design Coordinator Philipp Weber).
Without further adieu, check it out:
Tell us about how you came to be a quest designer at CDPR.
I started out using the modding tool for The Witcher 2 called “Redkit” and created my mod “Lykaon”, which won a Redkit modding competition. I got a beautiful prize for it: a one-of-a-kind replica of Aerondight, the silver sword Geralt receives from the Lady of the Lake.
After that, I was contacted by Pawel “Banan” Panasiuk from CD Projekt Red, who asked me if I would be interested in applying as a level designer for The Witcher 3. Of course I was, so I prepared a level design test and had an interview with the company. Funny enough I wasn’t hired as a level designer, but as a quest designer instead, because I didn’t just want to build a level, but also added a story and characters to it.
Just a few weeks later I joined the company and started working on Wild Hunt.
How is modding different than quest design for a AAA game development company?
The biggest difference for me is that at CD Projekt Red I get to collaborate with lots of fantastic colleagues. When I was modding I was mostly doing things by myself (although I can’t forget to mention invaluable help by my girlfriend who did all the hard scripting for me. On top of that, there were other modders like “Tekoppar” who helped me with lots of tech aspects or Sardas, who created amazing art. I even had Gavin from “Miracle of Sound” voice Dandelion for a while, which was great!).
I have to say that doing things by myself gave me lots of freedom, but it’s nothing compared to all the great ideas that come out of working with other talented people.
Every time I get new dialogue, cinematics or art, it still amazes me how much their work can elevate the quests. On top of that, our QA team provides great help in finding issues with the quest and new ideas. When I was modding and working in a vacuum, it was easy to become blind to larger issues, so having someone with a critical eye watch over your work is incredibly helpful.
However, I sometimes still get to use my modding sensibilities and come up with a few new things that aren’t usually done by quest designers, even on Cyberpunk. So I think the modding spirit is still there deep inside!
How does the process of designing a quest work at CDPR?
It all starts with ideas. Contrary to what many people believe, having the ideas is actually the easiest part of the whole process. We usually write down hundreds of them as pitches and choose the best ones.
Usually a pitch for a quest is just half a page of text, but once it’s chosen, we turn it into a full written quest design that can have 10 pages or more.
The quest design can be compared to a screenplay without finished dialogue, since it’s basically the full quest, just for reading. We separate it into sections like “SCENE”, “EXPLORATION”, “PLAYSTYLES” so the reader can already see the major beats that the quest will have.
At this point we start our iteration process. The quest design is read by our writers, the Lead Quest Designer and directors, so they can all give feedback. But at this stage, we work the closest with our writers, who are assigned to the quest together with us so both can create the characters and story in this early form.
Once the design gets accepted, we move forward to the implementation stage, in which the quest designer builds the whole quest from start to finish in our tools, to create a very basic playable version. For this version, we also write simple “debug dialogue”. We give a vague outline how the dialogue could flow and what topics the characters talk about, but it’s not proper dialogue. As an example, we write everything in the third person.
“V greets Dex. She’s new to this, so she shows him lots of respect. What job does he have to offer?”
It’s important that we write our dialogue this way so the writers still have their freedom to be creative. Of course our debugs can also be on a very detailed level, but writing in third person gives it enough of a disconnect so the writer doesn’t feel like he’s subconsciously led to write dialogues in a certain way. It’s my job to create the best possible environment for my writers to create amazing stories, so I also like to adapt to the style of every writer I work with. Sometimes I write more detailed debug dialogues, and sometimes I am purposely rather vague.
From there on, we keep iterating the quest and giving it more detail, implementing gameplay features as they come in and we of course work with many different teams. As an example, I also have to talk to designers and artists about what locations, characters, gameplay features, vfx, sounds, etc. I need and put this information in a production tool we use, so each producer of a team can keep track of them. So it’s not just important to be creative as a quest designer, but we also have to be very organized.
If you want a more detailed version of this, you can actually check this talk I gave a few years ago in which I explain the process of working on “The Warble of a Smitten Knight”:
When we hear devs at CDPR talk about designing games, we often hear a lot about how it’s an iterative process. When do you start feeling confident that you’ve got a concept that is really going to work for a quest?
To be perfectly honest, it comes and goes. I often start really liking an idea at the start and work towards it, but once we add more detail and complications, that is when the flaws rear their ugly heads.
But throughout production, there are always these special moments when I start to “feel” my quest. When I can read final dialogue, when some great art comes in, I can hear the voice acting and especially when custom music is created for my quest. I still get goosebumps when I think back on hearing the theme of the Lady of the Lake in Blood and Wine for the first time in my quest after talking to our composer about it many months before.
True confidence in my quests usually comes only after they’ve been released to the public and I can see the actual feedback of thousands of people playing it.
I think it’s important to keep this critical distance from your work, because when we’re creating art, thinking that whatever I am making is always great usually leads to a bad result.
What makes a quest “good,” in your opinion?
Quests can be very different, so I’d say there’s also different qualities they can have. We thankfully don’t have a checklist that says that every single quest has to have particular things or a specific structure because I think this would really limit our creativity (we never say that “This is a fetch quest.” “This is an escort quest” or anything like this. Every quest just grows organically).
For me personally, it’s when a player can feel like he really went on his own journey. When this journey brought him to many exciting, but also emotional places that might make him think - and most importantly, if the player really feels like this is “his” story, based on decisions he made and relationships he created with our characters.
I often try to get a good mix in. When I play games, I’m a “story guy”, so that’s always the most important part for me. But I also enjoy coming up with interesting gameplay scenarios that maybe aren’t available in any other quest (this is where the modding background helps a lot!) because at the end of the day, most quests should also simply be fun to play!
How important is pacing when designing a quest?
It’s of course very important, and this is something where our leads and directors are excellent at pinpointing issues and their ideas to improve a quest. They play the whole game a lot, so they have a good feeling for how it should flow. Sometimes we might get caught up in our own quests, but the quest before that one is already very sad and doesn’t have a lot of gameplay, so following that up with a similar mood and gameplay structure might not be the best idea.
However, we also don’t “shoehorn in” gameplay if it doesn’t fit. Sometimes pacing-wise there might be too many scenes after another, but if it’s much better for the story, than we’d rather not have perfect pacing than to just add something in there for the sake of changing it up. But if we plan well, we can actually tell an interesting story, but still have different things going on to give it a brisk pacing.
How do you avoid the dreaded “fetch quest” when inherently all quests involve some amount of “go here, do X”?
When I started on The Witcher 3, we had a huge document with all ideas for quests. One of them was to find letters all over the world and you got a reward once you found them. It was rejected, and there was a comment there from our lead quest designer at the time, Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz: “We. Don’t. Do. Fetch. Quests!”
So of course it's always good to have these easy rules in mind, but I think it also just comes with experience. Our quests usually aren’t built around specific gameplay actions, but interesting stories - and sometimes you need to fetch something there, but if there’s more to the story than you probably also do five other things on the way, so the one part where you fetch something doesn’t feel bad.
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