Romance Triss or Yennefer? For a while in The Witcher 3, there wasn't going to be a choice

Triss or Yennefer? It's one of the audience-dividing questions people ask each other when they talk about their playthroughs of The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, about which sorceress they romanced. But for a while during development, the choice wasn't there.

A Triss romance option wasn't added until late in development, CD Projekt Red joint-CEO Adam Badowski has told PC Gamer. "It wasn't [there] from the beginning," he said. "But at some point we understood that this lack of conflict, personal conflict - of course there's Ciri - but there was a lack of something," he said. Then it was suggested players could make a romantic choice between Yennefer and Triss and the proverbial penny dropped.

"This decision was made pretty late," Badowski said, "but it was great. It was a great decision."

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It's an interesting tidbit I'm surprised we haven't heard before, and it explains perhaps why the game feels so heavily weighted towards Yennefer, because the bulk of the story had been designed around her.

It's as the game's lead writer Marcin Blacha recently told me: "The most important thing about Geralt and the most important thing about the books is the relationship between Geralt, Ciri and Yennefer," he said in an article reflecting on 10 years of The Witcher 3 and what went wrong and what went right. "I already did two games with no sign of Ciri, no sign of Yennefer, and then we finally had a budget and proper time for pre-production, so for me, it was time to introduce both characters."

To underline that point: Yennefer didn't appear in either The Witcher 1 or The Witcher 2, partly because CDPR was putting off the responsibility of realising such an important character in Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher fiction. By The Witcher 3, it was ready to take the fiction-shaping story of Yennefer and Ciri on.

Triss, though, does appear in the previous two Witcher games and as a central romance choice. There's a steamy romance sequence with her in The Witcher 2, where she disrobes magically, much like Yennfer, and then jumps in a swimming pool and beckons you in. And I seem to remember a romance sequence with Triss as soon as in the prologue in The Witcher 1, in the Witcher Wolf School's stronghold of Kaer Morhern. Wasn't Triss' the first titillating sex-card you collected in The Witcher 1?

There is a remake of The Witcher 1 in development, of course, which I expect will completely reimagine these sex scenes. Badowski in the same PC Gamer interview referred to these cards as being "childish". However, as per a financials-related update given earlier this year, The Witcher 1 remake is held up, and the sticking point seems to be migrating to Unreal Engine 5. CD Projekt Red has opted to use Epic's ubiquitous game engine for remake as well as for upcoming mainline entry The Witcher 4, but adapting the engine for the studio's needs is evidently taking some time.