CD Projekt Red Developers Reveal Major Witcher 4 Production Pipeline Changes and Solutions for Past Documentation Failures in Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher Series
During a game industry conference Digital Dragons CD Projekt Red developers laid out sweeping changes to their internal production pipeline that will avoid a repeat of past mistakes on The Witcher 4. According to a GamesRadar report technical writers Jaroslaw Rucinski and Adrian Fulneczek detailed the past failure and current remedies the company faced after missing and overwhelming archives blocked the production process on past games.
There has always been issues with missing documentation at CD Projekt Red. Rucinski and Fulneczek revealed during The Witcher 1 and 2, no documentation was made of any technical aspect of the game which caused huge issues external partners and remakes such as Fools Theory who is remaking The Witcher game today have had very little source to work from.
As an effort to try and fix the missing documentation during the production of Cyberpunk 2077 the company implemented Confluence, which managed to get designers to store their design data, but when that became too much there was 8000 pages of poorly organized data. Fulneczek then claimed, staff didn't view keeping that many archives updated, which lead to an out of sync system divided between 2 very large tomes for main game and expansions, this caused poor internal communication, loss of work and major issues with external contractors.
As a solution for The Witcher 4 and other internal projects CD Projekt Red has now set up a clearly labeled, integrated data bank for each internal department. This ensures that all departments work to the same goals preventing departments from working on the same problem individually and wasting work.
Fulneczek had a very positive report when talking about the state of their pipeline:
"The future looks really promising. We learned the lesson. A collaborative approach ensures that problems are not solved multiple times by different teams and that if a breakthrough happens in one of the projects, the entire company benefits from it."
Although company officials have promised new games will be free of errors in the past, this shows how their efforts are being implemented.
