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View, browse and sort the ever-growing list of sessions by day, pass type, topic, and format. With this Session Viewer, you can view GDC 2023 session details and speakers, and share your favorites via social media. You will be able to build your schedule and access it during the show via export or Mobile App, once live. Sessions do fill up and seating is first come, first serve, so arrive early to sessions that you would like to attend.

10 Key Quest Design Lessons from 'The Witcher 3' and 'Cyberpunk 2077'

Paweł Sasko  (Quest Director, CD Projekt RED)

Location: Room 301, South Hall

Date: Wednesday, March 22

Time: 9:00 am - 10:00 am

Pass Type: All Access Pass, Core Pass

Topic: Design, Production & Team Leadership

Format: Lecture

Vault Recording: Video

Audience Level: Intermediate

Learn the 10 most important and universal quest design lessons—based on Paweł Sasko's 17 years of experience in the video game industry, and illustrated by examples from The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077.

This session walks through three main parts: mastering the plot, structuring the narrative, and improving the design. Each part discusses elements like engagement with the story, the brevity of the narrative, designing for fun, creating emotional impact, structuring choices and consequences in non-linear stories, tackling and approaching novelty, production effectiveness, and more.

Plus, learn the typical traps and pitfalls of narrative designers in the AAA space and discover some solutions to those challenges, accompanied by the numerous anecdotes from the development process of these epic RPGs.

Takeaway

Attendees will learn how to create narratives for massive non-linear roleplaying games, and the typical challenges involved with the process. Lessons learned are structured to be fairly universal, inspirational, and illustrated with examples from The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077.

Intended Audience

This is for game designers who are interested in crafting compelling, non-linear narratives. Attendees should have at least a basic understanding of creating stories for interactive media, while those working on narrative games will get the most out of it.