Abandoned projects. The Witcher beyond CDPR trilogy

The Witcher from Metropolis Software was very ambitious... At the time.

The story of the digital Witcher is not just a tale of timeless action RPGs and forgotten spin-offs. It's also the story of a surprisingly extensive set of productions that were often cancelled at a very advanced stage.

Even before CD Projekt even dreamed of moving from publishing games to developing them, Metropolis Software – founded by Adrian Chmielarz and Grzegorz Miechowski, two legends of Polish gamedev who gave us games like Teenagent, The Prince and the Coward or Gorky 17 – also tried to tackle the output of Sapkowski. That Witcher was created in late 1990s and was an incredibly ambitious project (side note: it's actually Chmielarz, who came up with the English translation of the title). A three-dimensional action game with RPG elements was to impress with modern technologies and offer a system of moral choices. Ultimately, Metropolis never delivered, which later opened the way for CD Project's exploits.

The screenshots of The Return of the White Wolf were impressive, but progress on the game itself was reportedly sluggish.

The first Witcher from CDPR spawned not only a direct sequel and the aforementioned Versus and Crimson Trail, but also three discontinued projects. The most infamous of these was Rise of the White Wolf, an expanded port of the original installment developed for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 that was intended to offer improved graphics and a revamped combat system. The conversion was entrusted to French Widescreen Games, with whom CD Projekt parted ways in an air of mutual accusations in 2009, putting a definite end to the Rise of the White Wolf and... bringing the French company to the verge of bankruptcy.

This was also one of the lowest points in history of CD Projekt, since the company had to abandon two expansions planned for the original Witcher. One of them was to be titled Outcast and offer adventures from Geralt's younger years. There is extensive documentation of this expansion being developed by studio roXidy, and from it, we can learn that the DLC would have taken us to the Faroe Isle in western Skellige. There, we would explore the story of a monster preying on pregnant women, and the story of the family of Harald, the Jarl of Kaer Karreg.

Outcast's documentation circulating on the web reveals a lot of interesting information – for example, we can see maps of the locations we would have visited in the DLC.

There's much less info about the other expansion, Scars of Betrayal – we know it would have been developed by Ossian Studios, and that action would have taken place in Mahakam.

1. More about the Witcher: Rise of the White Wolf