As part of the insanely ambitious What Lies Unseen datamined development history of The Witcher 3, the project’s creators made an amusing discovery: A script for an early version of the quest “Through Time and Space” where Geralt and Avallac’h teleport to Night City from Cyberpunk 2077.
Through Time and Space is one of my favorite quests in The Witcher 3: In order to reach the homeworld of the Wild Hunt, the Witcher and sage have to skip from world to world in a dimension-hopping chain of portals. They find themselves braving a desert planet that was once the bed of a sentient ocean, a toxic swamp, an underwater cave, and a world already ruined by the White Frost. It’s this bracing, exciting, and surprising bit of high-concept sci-fi in The Witcher 3 that I just really dig.
The draft script for Through Time and Space is markedly different from the final one, with Geralt and Avallac’h finding their first portal in a Redanian garrison instead of Novigrad, and they get teleported to, among other places, the court of King Radovid but weeks in the past. The first jaunt, though, would send them to Night City, with Geralt and Avallac’h exchanging the following dialogue:
- Geralt: “What… What is this place? Is this the afterlife?”
- Avallac’h: “No. Just another of the realities the Spiral leads through… Technologically advanced, but broken. Dying.”
- Geralt: “Disgusting. This stench, noise… How can you live here?!”
- Avallac’h: “You should know better. This world is inhabited by humans, not elves.”
The What Lies Unseen team also stated that CD Projekt Red developers have talked publicly about wanting to implement a scene like this. It’s unclear what district of the city the two would have found themselves in, or what it would have even looked like. At this stage of The Witcher 3’s development (circa 2012), CDPR had not even put out that legendary/infamous first pre-rendered trailer announcing Cyberpunk 2077.
According to the What Lies Unseen team, developers from CDPR have also said in interviews that they had wanted to have Geralt give some Novigrad coins to a panhandler during this scene, with the same character showing up rich and prosperous as an easter egg in Cyberpunk 2077.
This would have been sick to see in-game back in 2015, but I think I’m happy with the version of the quest we got. CDPR has instead adopted more subtle ways of implying a shared multiverse connection between The Witcher and Cyberpunk, most notably a long-running, cryptic in-game puzzle in Cyberpunk 2077 that corresponds to a hidden room in The Witcher 3. Having Geralt just show up in Night City and say “This place stinks!” would have precluded those more subtle later efforts.
I do love that The Witcher’s dimension hopping rules mean that every promotional tie-in involving Geralt and Ciri could just be a canon example of them teleporting between worlds. Geralt in Monster Hunter and Soul Calibur? You better believe it’s canon, baby. For more Witcher 3 secrets, we have an overview article about the other new information revealed so far by the What Lies Unseen team.