An E3 demo from 2014 was a major turning point for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and for developer CD Projekt Red more generally, according to the beloved game’s makers.

The Witcher 3 is now one of the most revered, well-known games in the entire RPG genre, having sold over 60 million copies and counting, but there was a time when CD Projekt Red was a relatively niche studio. Sure, The Witcher 1 and 2 definitely had solid fanbases and good ideas – The Witcher 3 is what turned CDPR into a household name, though.

The Witcher 4‘s narrative director Philipp Weber recalled, in an interview with GamesRadar+, that that shift began happening when a working demo for the threequel started to gain traction at E3, courting fans from another massive fantasy epic.

“There was this feeling that it was going to be bigger,” Weber remembered. “Skyrim was the open world game, and we could feel that suddenly a lot of people who loved Skyrim started paying attention to The Witcher 3. We could kind of feel this… big wave, touching us. There was an excitement, where we could tell that the general public was taking notice. It was a very interesting thing to see.”

The rest is history. The Witcher 3 launched to rave reviews, countless awards, and a decade later, CDPR even went back to add just “one more patch” bringing mods to consoles for the first time ever. To no one’s surprise, it’s also influencing the direction the studio takes with The Witcher 4.

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