Geralt is a lot of things in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, including a hero and a skilled warrior, but there is one thing he really never gets the chance to be — wealthy.
Even after taking on a number of quests and killing countless monsters, I never seemed to have enough money in The Witcher 3, forcing Geralt to resort to stealing supplies, rather than buying them. While I just assumed this was due to poor money management on my part, it turns out that keeping Geralt poor was actually one of CD Projekt RED’s goals.
In an interview with Edge, Senior Games Designer Damien Monnier and Senior Quest Designer Pawel Sasko talked a bit about the game’s economic system, explaining that in the The Witcher books (which the games were based off of), “Geralt was very poor,” and that was “one of the cool things we wanted to keep” in the game.
Monnier: We didn’t want Geralt to be this multimillionaire that just goes around killing monsters. Ultimately, he does it for money; we really wanted you to try to haggle over prices and get more, because you really need the money.
Sasko: In the books, Geralt was very poor; he was always struggling for money. It was one of the cool things we wanted to keep. There are a lot of funny stories about our economy. A QA tester came to us like, “I’m level ten, and I have 6,000 gold and have nothing to spend it on,” and we had to work out what happened. We’d left a door unlocked to a big villa – he’d robbed it and sold all these expensive swords.
What are your thoughts of the economy of The Witcher 3? Do you appreciate that Geralt never really has money to spend, or do you wish that money was easier to come by?
[Source: GamesRadar]
