The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2 have gotten ample attention for their whizbang Unreal Engine features and potential major cast resurrections, but one of their key 'enhancements' may seem horribly dry: their creation will be much, much better documented than any Witcher or Cyberpunk game before. This also means that they will be a stronger foundation for Witcher and Cyberpunk games to come. Both games are following a new production process that obliges the devs to keep their internal development notes up to date, from milestone to milestone – whether it be a narrative bible, a tool guide or a folder of sketches.

As technical writer team lead Jarosław Ruciński and senior technical writer Adrian Fulneczek explained during a presentation at this year's Digital Dragons conference in Kraków, CD Projekt have learned the value of good internal documentation the hard way over the past 20 years, with company lorekeepers departing and crucial tools shelved to cut costs, sabotaging work on everything from Cyberpunk 2077's Phantom Liberty DLC to the forthcoming Witcher remake at Fool's Theory.

"The reality is that information, it has a half-life," Ruciński told an audience of developers. "Every year that passes, the important and obvious reasons why a specific feature was made the way it was become blurry and murky." CD Projekt's mistakes on this front are partly the result of not anticipating their own success. Back during development of the original Witcher – which was based on abandoned code for a PC port of Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, with a starting team of 15 – nobody expected the studio to grow into a billion zloty operation with over a thousand staff on the books.

"The studio was still very small, very hungry for success, very ambitious," Fulneczek recalled. "But success wasn't guaranteed at all, and frankly, nobody was thinking 20 years ahead back then. We were still discovering our craft, our pipelines, and technology as we went. Now because the studio was so small, we thought we could rely on the oral tradition and tribal knowledge. It was a tight knit group, so the knowledge didn't live in a database somewhere – it was passed around [from senior to junior] over coffee."

"We have nothing from that period," he confessed. "Or at least, not in our centralised knowledge base. Perhaps we have some documents here and there on some old forgotten servers, but if we would like to find it, we would have to allocate masses of resources to do so – time and money, which we don't want. So if the state of your documentation is this black hole, this means you have to reverse engineer everything, and basically reverse engineer your own legacy."

This "black hole" has proven especially troublesome during development of The Witcher remake, announced in 2022. Fortunately, the latter's developers, Fool's Theory, employ a number of former CD Projekt developers. "That injection of lost tribal knowledge was certainly uplifting, but even with their help, gaps exist," Ruciński said, comparing working on the remake to figuring out a puzzle with most of the pieces missing. "I personally will take the most horrible, tangled, chaotic mess of documentation over no documentation," he commented. "Because you can spend time, spend some resources, and eventually figure out what the documentation was."

When development began on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, CD Projekt had "moved past the Wild West of The Witcher 1 and 2", Ruciński went on. The company created an internal wiki to keep track of the game's gestation, from day to day. Then, a bit inexplicably, they decided to shut the wiki down to save money.

"We only made one big mistake, which was thinking that the end of development for The Witcher 3 also meant the finish line for the documentation," Ruciński said. "Because on paper, the server hosting the wikipedia looked like a non-performing asset - it cost us maintenance and hosting, while at the same time the project was finished. So the company made the decision that the server should be shut down." Moreover, CD Projekt shut down the wiki without migrating any of the data elsewhere, or creating any real plan for mapping or labelling the information for retrieval.

There was no immediate impact, Ruciński said - "after all, this knowledge was still fresh in people's mind". It wasn't till years later, when the company began working on The Witcher 3 REDkit, a set of official modding tools, that the scale of the blunder became apparent. Fulneczek was tasked with creating a user guide for the tools, and quickly realised he had no starting point.

"There was nothing on the engine in our documentation," he said. "And also, [The Witcher 3 engine] is not the most intuitive of engines, right? It's pretty old by now." So began a period of trial and error, with Fulneczek hoping fervently that the original docs would "pop up magically".

Witcher remake developers Fool's Theory again came to the rescue. The latter's senior quest designer and former CD Projekt gameplay designer Martyna Lipińska uncovered a screenshot of the old Witcher 3 wiki, which was passed along to Fulneczek. "That was enough for me to start looking, start asking our IT about old, closed servers, chasing down broken image links," he said. "And finally, we found it."

The original wiki had been abandoned during a transition to an easier-to-use, modern database. Even given those improvements, younger devs coming to the wiki years later found some of the context missing. For example, there were mystifying references to some guy named Bob in filenames for The Witcher 3's Blood and Wine expansion. Quest designer Joanna Radomska eventually supplied an explanation – the Blood and Wine expansion was once known as "The Bell of Beauclair".

Perhaps bizarrely, "the best documented game" in CD Projekt's history according to Ruciński is spin-off Witcher cardgame Gwent. "In a live service environment, which you could argue Gwent was, it is easy to say that you don't have the time to document everything, because the game is changing so fast," he said. "It receives patches, new content, new balance, every month. So all those documents need to be constantly updated, and somebody has to do that. It is a cost."

The developers opted to "pay this documentation tax upfront", however, rather than kick it down the road. As a result, said Ruciński, "new artists, new coders, new designers could jump onto any task within Gwent and contribute instantly." This demonstrates that "documentation doesn't have to slow you down, you don't have to think of documentation as something that will only be useful years later. Documentation can actually speed you up, make you faster right now."

Things didn't go nearly so well during the creation of Cyberpunk 2077 – a "true test of scale" for CD Projekt's technical writers. "Cyberpunk was a fresh start, but it came with new problems," Fulneczek recalled. "It was a massive undertaking. The hopes and expectations surrounding it were enormous. Internally, we had our documentation tool, Confluence, we had a proof of concept of 'living' documentation, so we thought, we were ready.

"But it turned out we weren't, because Cyberpunk was the first project of this scale, this size that we documented, and it also took a very long time," he went on. "And during those eight, nine years of development, we created over 8000 pages of documentation, and that's because of how complex this project was, and it also had many iterations along the way. And as with every project, the sprint to the finish line starts, and suddenly maintaining the documentation becomes a lower priority, when the release date is closing in."

Cyberpunk 2077's development corpus grew so enormous that when it came to DLC expansion Phantom Liberty, CD Projekt decided to carve things up, storing newer files on external servers. "At the same time, the company decided to move to a cloud instance of Confluence," said Fulneczek. This soon led to confusion, both within CD Projekt and at external partners. "The base game documentation, we left it on [our] server," Fulneczek continued. "Also, when we started to issue patches for the base game, we did that on the cloud instance. And for example, when we were preparing a version for the Mac OS, we did that on the server instance. So it was chaos. We had two spaces, two instances."

The split added to the exhaustion of developers attempting to salvage Cyberpunk 2077 following its infamously rickety launch showing. "A situation like this, and we also have some studies to back this up, with fragmented documentation, it clearly can correlate to burnout," Fulneczek added. "If you can, don't divide between platforms and different tools. If you have to, link very clearly between them, but always aim to have this one source of truth."

Which brings us to Cyberpunk 2 and The Witcher 4. CD Projekt have made keeping the docs in order a non-negotiable fixture of their development. "We've got some new requirements, especially a new definition of 'done'," Fulneczek said. "So as you know, any project, any game goes through development states, and right now, every stage ends with a gate. Part of the requirements to pass that gate is the documentation, which wasn't the case before."

Both development teams have access to the same repository of knowledge, so that "if a team working on The Witcher figures out a solution a specific issue, the Cyberpunk team can see it, benefit from it, take it into their own code," as Ruciński explained. CD Projekt's artists have specialised Confluence tools, but people in other disciplines are able to view their work, without needing any extra training.

The improved ways of sharing knowledge also reflect the fact that CD Projekt is now a global operation, with offices in North America. "Working in between multiple time zones and places, you can't wholly rely on conversations, even if sometimes you want to!" Ruciński added. "It just doesn't happen. So documentation becomes the bridge."

The question of documentation may seem powerfully boring, next to hot chat about folkoric woodland monsters or dream-haunted dystopian cities, but all of those things naturally rely on the maintenance and transmission of know-how from generation to generation. For a scruffy new studio living on the edge of their means, jotting everything down in a wiki may feel like exasperating admin, but even the most slapdash insight about how a game was made can be priceless down the road. "The mantra that less is more is really good for someone that's creating the documentation here and now," Ruciński said. "But more is everything for someone who is fixing an issue ten years later."

This feature was based on a press trip to Digital Dragons, with the event's organisers paying for travel and accommodation.