Fantasy Dress Party: How Live-Action Role-Play Inspired ‘The Witcher 3’

It's Friday night and I'm getting ready for a night on the town. As I stare at myself in the mirror, I can't help but regret the recent flurry of nights on the piss that I've indulged and the 3AM kebabs and pizzas and chips and the fact that I've been paying £15.99 [$25] a month for a gym membership that my reflection quite blatantly proves is all but redundant at this point.

But I've got good boxer shorts, I tell myself. Those ones with a guy's name emblazoned on the waistband that cost about 400 percent more than anyone should ever have to pay for underwear. I might need to shift some belly fat, but at least I'm covered in the pants department.

Then there's Geralt of Rivia—CD Projekt RED's esteemed Witcher series protagonist, prized monster hunter for hire, bearded beauty, and all-round badass. As far as contrasts go, him and I are centuries apart. What. A. Hunk.

But what about his fucking pants, man? He's got Y-fronts like bedsheets! He's built like a brick shithouse, has a killer dress sense, brilliant hair, and yet he chooses to cover up his modesty with those ungainly rags?

Anyone who follows VICE Gaming's Mike Diver on Twitter might've spied his recent bemusement with regards to our Geralt's drawers: "Thing is, right, his pants," he observes in conversation with games critic Kate Grey. "Geralt's pants. All those fancy trousers and gauntlets and boots. And his pants. Are just awful… He has the worst baggy granny kecks. Yen should have fixed him up with some tightie-whities years ago."

He's not wrong. And yet Geralt's rig-out is otherwise quite stunning. So, too, are all the garments and garbs donned by friend and foe alike across the game's Northern Kingdoms.

When I attended CD Projekt RED's The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt press junket in January, I, alongside a host of other games journos, was told about how Scotland inspired much of the game's level design. The event took place in Stirling Castle—a fitting spot, given The Witcher series' grandiose locales—and we were fed lines about Scotland's rich history, that the mostly Polish team was inspired by the land's ruins, dramatic landscapes, cliffs, hills. It was all very twee, but as a Glaswegian it was nice to see them speak so passionately about Scotland.

Related: Watch our documentary on Magic: The Gathering

In-game, the environments looked good, but what caught my eye most was the clothes, the tattoos, the outlandish clan uniforms—how did they come about designing the minor details that populated the inspired "battle-scarred Scottish plains," as one CDPR team member had put it.

"The biggest battle I took part in was the Battle of Grunwald," says concept artist Jan Marek. "I was one of the Infantry polearms." If, like me, you're not clued up on 15th century Polish-Lithuanian war history, the Battle of Grunwald took place in 1410. Marek, of course, is not six centuries old, but a keen re-enactor. His deep understanding of the medieval era is behind each and every character roaming the world of The Witcher.

"Reconstruction is something I've been doing for around 18 years," he continues. "It all started when my sister Maria convinced me to participate in a tournament which was organized by her knight brotherhood. She was one of the founders of the first Brotherhood in Lublin.

"Everyone there was much older than me, they were pretty serious about what they were doing—it was very impressive for such a young person like me. During one of the first trainings, one of the fellows cut someone's forehead, but I didn't really care—role-playing medieval times was something I instantly fell in love with."

I must admit, I've personally always found re-enacting at this level a bit odd. The thought of dressing up and fake-fighting in the middle of a freezing cold field on a Saturday afternoon doesn't appeal to me whatsoever. But then again, video games don't appeal to a lot of folk.

Why sink hours into games like FIFA, when you can join a Sunday league team? Why play games like Dear Esther, when you could just as easily take up hill walking? In that sense, who am I to judge? Okay, so you can't exactly live out the life of a Witcher game in the real world. Well, actually, you sort of can. And Marek does.

As he describes a day in the life of a re-constructionist, I imagine the iterative stages of games development—I think of CD Projekt RED running around a studio, each member tinkering with whatever they're working on at that moment in time.

"It's hard to speak about a typical day when you are talking about reconstructions," Marek adds. "People play many roles—some like combat, some craft items like perfume, glass, and armors, and then there are some who are into reconstructing medieval pilgrims. Different people like different things. I even know some who create medieval furniture.

'The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt', A Night to Remember Trailer (contains bloody violence and nudity).

"Usually people make their uniforms themselves, using materials similar to those used in medieval times. When I was making concepts of the uniforms worn in Wild Hunt, the knowledge about medieval and renaissance attire helped me a lot. The universe of The Witcher is still predominantly fantasy, so there was no need to stick to the historical references 1:1, but it certainly spurred me to be as authentic as possible.

"I can't really tell how much time it took me to research stuff for Wild Hunt; it's all about years of experience and the fact that what I do is my passion. We were using thousands of photos from reconstructions and source materials like paintings and other works of art from the Middle Ages."

Jonas Mattsson, senior environment artist at CDPR, tells me just how much Marek "digs" his re-enacting. When it's re-enacting season, Marek apparently arrives at work with a Blackadder-style bowl haircut, and is even known to take time off in order to take part in famous battles, such as Grunwald.

But this only serves to highlight how much goes into a game like The Witcher 3. Sure, online forums have rightly flagged the difference in quality between early screenshots and what's set to arrive next week, but a lot clearly goes into sculpting such a sprawling living and breathing world nonetheless. When I spoke to CDPR level designer Miles Tost, he explained that Wild Hunt's side quests were designed to be as engrossing and engaging as the game's main storyline. Mattsson explains some of the thinking behind this in relation to the character outfits.

"You might meet a thug and think: Why's he dressed like that? Has he stolen the clothes? What's the history with the clothing, and so on. Even if it's a bandit on the road, it's really important that it feels like the bandit has been through something, has experienced something. We even motion captured with a proper swordsman as well, so we tried to keep everything as authentic as possible—there's a lot of research [that] goes into this. And it's all about having a realistic dress sense.

"I really like the Nilfgaardian because they're very arrogantly dressed—it's black, it's gold, it's all in their attitude, and they're like the Roman Empire, almost. They take pride in their uniform, it's the arrogance of that that I really like, because it really speaks of them and it really comes through."

He continues: "There's a lot of research done on tattoos, too—even as something which might go totally unnoticed by the player. Some [characters] have classic sailor tattoos, or clan tattoos as well, so they fit. You might have a sailor with little tattoos dotted here and there because he's been at sea and around the world.

"If you've been to prison it's the same. Tattoos in The Witcher 3 are a way of telling the story of a person. The same goes for scars—a scar on someone's face can make people think, 'Oh, that's a tough one,' that he or she is a fighter and has been through something and survived."

Mattsson then tells me that Geralt's new (dynamically growing) beard in Wild Hunt isn't a reflection of the modern hipster trend, but an indication that he's been on the road for a while and thus hasn't had the chance to shave. Back in January, I couldn't believe my eyes when I spotted Geralt's pants. I can only assume this design factors into the whole over-travelled thing, as I can't be convinced he couldn't have sourced a better fit.

Either way, I've some words of advice for you, Geralt: if those fancy Witcher Senses of yours have Wi-Fi, for the love of god point your browser here.

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