The Witcher 3 didn't originally make you choose between romancing Yennefer or Triss: 'This decision was made pretty late'

Adam Badowski, joint CEO of CD Projekt Red, doesn't look back fondly on the collectible-card romance options in The Witcher 1. "It was childish in the beginning," he says when the topic comes up. He's much more pleased with how things turned out in The Witcher 3, which did justice to what he calls "the emotional aspects of the characters from the books."

After two games in which Yennefer is barely mentioned and relegated to flashbacks, she drops into The Witcher 3 like a bomb to upset the cozy relationship you probably built with Triss in the second game. The ex Geralt never properly ended things with, and the canon love interest as book readers will tell you (it's me, I'm book readers), she complicates Geralt's love life and forces him to belatedly grow up—which feels thematically appropriate, as he retakes his place as Ciri's father figure over the course of the game.

Yet that element wasn't always part of The Witcher 3. As Badowski says, "It wasn't [there] from the beginning, but at some point we understood that this lack of kind of conflict, personal conflict—of course, there's Ciri—but there was a lack of something." As soon as someone suggested the idea of making players choose between Triss and Yennefer, they realized this was what had been missing. "This decision was made pretty late," he says, "but it was great. It was a great decision."

Romance in RPGs is a hot-button topic, with developers avoiding it for years out of fear players would react badly. When BioWare finally added romance to Baldur's Gate 2 they did so cautiously, dropping some of the romances they'd planned due to that wariness. Now romance is such a common element of RPGs its absence is notable enough that Obsidian can earn praise for downplaying it. Though even while giving Obsidian props for not including romance in all its games, our news writer Joshua Wolens gave a shout-out to The Witcher 3's handling of it, "because both Geralt and Yennefer felt like individuals with flaws and quirks."

We can argue about whether there's too much romance in Baldur's Gate 3 or not enough in Avowed, but The Witcher 3 is the Goldilocks middle, getting it just right. And on the important question of whether he chose Yennefer or Triss, Badowski came down on the side of book readers everywhere: "My choice will always be Yennefer."