Artur Ganszyniec reveals how The Witcher’s king‑slaying cliffhanger blindsided the story team, why he thinks it was a mistake, and how those lessons could shape CD Projekt’s remakes and future Witcher games.
In 2007, The Witcher ended twice.
Players saw Geralt of Rivia avert war in Vizima, confront the Grand Master and walk away from a plague of politics that did not quite belong to Andrzej Sapkowski’s wandering monster hunter. Then the screen faded to the illustrated epilogue the writers had actually planned, a reflective coda about identity, choices and uncertain roads.
After that, without the story team’s knowledge, a CG movie played and quietly changed the future of the franchise.
The ending the writers thought they were making
Artur Ganszyniec, lead story designer on the first game, has been revisiting The Witcher on his YouTube channel with running developer commentary. In that playthrough he explains that, for most of production, the narrative team believed the game would conclude with the now often overlooked artwork epilogue.
That ending fit the tone of the project. CD Projekt’s debut RPG was built on Sapkowski’s short stories more than grand novel‑sized plots. Geralt was an amnesiac witcher unmoored from his past, moving through a grounded, grubby slice of the Continent. Morality was local, often ugly and rarely world‑shaking.
The illustrated outro mirrored that spirit. It looked back at how the player had treated non‑humans, handled the Scoia’tael, chosen between supporting the Order or standing apart, and sketched possible futures for side characters. Most importantly it left Geralt himself in a liminal state. He was a survivor of the White Frost and of a pogrom, a professional killer of monsters still working out who he wanted to be.
There was no hint that witchers would suddenly become political assassins.
The CG stinger nobody told the story team about
While the narrative crew crunched to finish quests and dialogue, management decided the game needed something more dramatic. As Ganszyniec recalls, either the board or co‑founder Michał Kiciński pushed for a rendered cinematic outro.
That decision birthed one of the series’ most famous scenes. In the final CG sequence, Geralt receives a mysterious visitor during an audience with King Foltest. The stranger reveals himself as a witcher‑like figure and lunges at the king. Geralt intervenes, killing the assassin and discovering the same catlike eyes behind the visor that stare back at him in the mirror.
The cut to black teases a question that had never been part of the original narrative plan: who is training witchers to kill kings, and why?
According to both VGC and Eurogamer’s reporting on Ganszyniec’s commentary, the story team did not meaningfully participate in conceiving or scripting that twist. It arrived late, built externally, and slotted in over their carefully scoped conclusion.
Ganszyniec is blunt about it years later. In his view that move was a mistake.
How a stinger turned The Witcher 2 into a political epic
On paper, the CG ending is an effective hook. It hands the studio a clear premise: witchers in royal intrigues. That is exactly what CD Projekt pursued in The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings.
The sequel opens with the fallout from that stinger. Foltest is murdered, Geralt is framed and the player is thrown into a narrative defined by coups, succession crises and Nilfgaardian plots. Every major act hinges on who sits which throne.
Ganszyniec’s criticism is not that the story is bad. By most measures, Assassins of Kings is one of the more intricate political RPGs of its era. The complaint is that the imposed twist forced the series down a road that narrowed what Geralt’s stories could be about.
He argues that once the CG outro suggested witchers killing monarchs, CD Projekt felt locked into delivering on that promise. Rather than another grounded tale about a mutant outcast doing dangerous work on the edge of society, the follow‑up became a game about statecraft in which Geralt was dragged along by forces far above his pay grade.
In that frame, there was less space to explore his relationships with Yennefer, Ciri or the found family that defines Sapkowski’s books. The sequel gestured toward Geralt’s past, but the thematic center of gravity had shifted away from the questions that drove the first game’s epilogue: what does it mean to be a witcher, and what kind of person is Geralt if you strip away destiny and contracts?
The unintended result of a one‑minute cinematic was a series that, for a time, belonged more to kings than to the killer of monsters on its box art.
The course correction in Wild Hunt
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is often framed as the point where CD Projekt finally nailed open‑world RPG design. Under the hood it is also a narrative correction.
Wild Hunt does not ignore politics. Novigrad’s religious fanaticism, the war‑torn swamps of Velen and Skellige’s clan disputes are all steeped in power struggles. Yet the spine of the plot is not about who rules Redania. It is about Geralt searching for Ciri and, by extension, the messy web of family, loyalty and chosen bonds that define him.
That shift reads, in hindsight, like a conscious move away from the corner the first game’s CG twist helped paint the series into. The most memorable stories in The Witcher 3 start small and personal before rippling outward. The Bloody Baron, the Crones of Crookback Bog, the quiet tragedies wrapped in contracts and side quests all tie back to Geralt’s empathy more than his usefulness to kings.
Ganszyniec points to this as a healthier balance. The setting remains huge and politically charged, but the narrative no longer feels beholden to a cinematic stinger conceived in isolation from the writing room.
“That was a mistake”: what Ganszyniec regrets
Looking back, Ganszyniec describes the decision to bolt a plot‑redefining CG movie onto the end of The Witcher without story input as a clear error.
Part of that regret is practical. The twist did not grow organically out of the player’s choices or the themes of the campaign. It arrived from above, as a marketing‑friendly cliffhanger that played the moment you put down the mouse. For a studio that built its reputation on reactive storytelling and consequence, the dissonance still stings.
The bigger issue is structural. By deciding in a boardroom that the series would be about witchers killing kings, the studio constrained its own future without the usual process of iteration, debate and refinement that goes into building an RPG plot. The writing team lost control of the compass right as they were learning to steer it.
Ganszyniec is not bitter about the franchise’s success. He repeatedly stresses his excitement to see what a new generation of developers do with The Witcher. But he is clear that one lesson from 2007 should be non‑negotiable going forward: endings, especially those that set the tone for sequels, cannot be treated as throwaway cinematics handled on the side.
What that means for The Witcher Remake
All of this history hangs over The Witcher Remake, currently in development at Fool’s Theory under CD Projekt RED’s supervision. Public statements from Fool’s Theory CEO Jakub Rokosz suggest the team is not afraid to cut or rework parts of the original that are “simply bad, outdated, or unnecessarily convoluted.” Combat, encounter design and some quest scaffolding are obvious candidates.
The harder question is what happens to that final twist.
A faithful remake would be expected to include the CG assassin sequence in some form. It is iconic, retroactively vital to the continuity of Assassins of Kings and familiar to anyone who came to the series through later entries. Removing it outright would create a strange fracture for players moving through a modernized trilogy in order.
Yet Ganszyniec’s comments make a compelling case for rethinking how that stinger functions.
One path is integration. Instead of treating the assassination attempt as an external short film tacked to the credits, a remake could plant seeds for the witcher‑killer throughout the campaign. Notes, contracts gone wrong or encounters in the margins of Vizima could hint that someone is training mutants for more than monster work. By the time Foltest is attacked, the event would feel like the culmination of an invisible subplot instead of a thought experiment dropped from the sky.
Another option is reframing. The remake might still show a witcher‑like figure lunging at Foltest, but center Geralt’s reaction in a way that foregrounds his confusion and agency. Dialogue could acknowledge that this intrusion is alien to his understanding of what witchers do, reinforcing rather than undermining the themes of the main story.
Crucially, both approaches would require the narrative team to own the twist instead of inheriting it from a CG vendor. If CD Projekt and Fool’s Theory apply the lesson Ganszyniec spells out, the remake’s ending will be written, quested and iterated like any other major plot beat.
Lessons for the next Witcher saga
CD Projekt has made it clear that The Witcher 4, currently the most advanced internal project at the studio, will kick off a new saga. The remake sits upstream from that future, potentially as the entry point for players discovering Geralt for the first time on modern hardware.
Integrated narrative discipline across those projects will matter more than ever.
The first lesson from 2007 is collaboration. Cinematic teams, boards and marketing departments can no longer ship story‑defining scenes without writers in the room. The success of The Witcher 3’s character‑driven quests shows what happens when every department works from the same thematic brief.
The second is humility about hooks. It is tempting, especially in an era of transmedia franchises, to end every game on a hard cliffhanger. The Witcher’s original artwork epilogue demonstrates another approach. You can close a chapter with reflection and ambiguity, trusting that strong characters and a rich world will bring players back without a crown‑toppling twist.
Finally there is continuity. A new saga and a full remake are an opportunity to harmonize what The Witcher is about. Ganszyniec’s comments imply a preference for stories where politics form the weather rather than the plot. If CD Projekt agrees, future games can still feature kings and wars, but the emotional core will remain with witchers, sorceresses and lost children trying to hold on to each other in a hostile world.
Viewed from that angle, the infamous CG cutscene at the end of The Witcher is both a cautionary tale and a gift. It forced the studio to confront how a single uncontrolled moment can yank a series off course. The Witcher Remake and whatever comes after have the benefit of hindsight.
If CD Projekt and Fool’s Theory choose to wield that hindsight well, the next time Geralt walks away from a throne room he will be heading into a future defined not by a boardroom twist, but by a story the writers meant to tell.