The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for the PS4, Xbox One and PC is still several months off, but the open-world RPG has been almost completely spoiled by a leak. The information that hit 4chan and Reddit reveals not just monsters, but major plot details, multiple endings, the world size and even one of the developer’s attitudes towards an encounter with a female character during the E3 demo.
This article will not contain any plot or ending spoiler material, so feel free to read ahead.
According to Eurogamer , The Witcher 3 leak occurred when someone hacked into a CD Projekt Red employee’s Google Drive account. A treasure trove of documents was discovered and posted to the internet, which put the developer in the awkward position of requesting fans of the game to resist the urge to take a peek.
“It has come to our attention that some of the production files for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt have emerged on the internet,” CD Projekt’s marketing head Michal Platkow-Gilewskiw told Eurogamer. “A portion of the files contains information about the story of the game so we strongly advise against accessing them, as this may heavily impact and spoil your future gaming experience.”
“We also like to reassure everyone that the disclosure of said documents does not affect the development cycle in any way.”
One of the more interesting non-spoiler tidbits is the size of The Witcher 3 game world. The documents peg the world to be 64 square kilometers (40 square miles). For comparison, Grand Theft Auto V ‘s map size is 79 sq km (49 sq mi). Of course, the difference is that players will be running and riding horses in The Witcher 3 versus driving cars, boats, helicopters and planes in GTA V.
Meanwhile, the E3 demo document is possibly the most amusing. It describes the 45 minute walkthrough of The Witcher 3 that was shown to attendees at convention with the following quote for one encounter.
“We talk to Keira Metz and she gives us a task: remove the curse from the tower in the swamps. (Boob physics eye candy, appropriately prepared dialogue).”
Obviously, this was not meant for public consumption, but it does give you a glimpse into the behind the scenes discussions on what to emphasize for games. At the same time, it shouldn’t be surprising. It’s a Mature-rated game, and the two previous titles had bits of nudity in it.
The leak even includes the full bestiary of monsters that will appear in the game, including those that have been removed. We aren’t going to share any of those because of potential spoilers, but it was humorous to see Venom from Spider-Man appear as fill-in artwork for one monster.
The documents also appear to confirm that the Xbox One Kinect will not be supported by The Witcher 3 and neither will SmartGlass. It’s likely that CD Projekt Red will elect to utilize the 10% of power that was reserved for Kinect to improve the game’s performance. That doesn’t leave out the possibility of voice commands as development proceeds over the next several months though.
Based on the documents, optimizing and putting the finishing touches on The Witcher 3 is where the developer will be spending the remaining time. The designs and features have been locked since February of this year and the game is playable. However, there is still content to be created, bugs to fix, voices and music to record plus performance to be optimized.
The Witcher 3 is currently scheduled to be released on Feb. 24, 2015 for the PS4, Xbox One and PC.