CD Projekt Red's two blockbuster RPGs, The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, are both known for their big main quests and engaging characters, but most of all, we hear people consistently talking about the little adventures they have in between other stories to do. In an interview with PC Gamer at GDC last week, Pawel Sasko, lead quest designer for Cyberpunk 2077, said the main reason for this is that they think of a lot of ideas and use only the best ones.

"A good designer has a 5-10% acceptance rate for his or her ideas," Sasko said, "and if someone has 10%, he or she is probably one of the best people on the team."

Sasko stressed that for CD Projekt, the key to weeding out bad ideas is the process by which quest designers pitch all ideas to the team, which allows the best ideas to stand out.

"So what I do with the designers is, okay, here's a list of genres. Here's a list of themes I want you to work on. Write your pitches. And they write five, ten, twenty pitches a day. Basically, a good pitch is like four sentences: says Sasco.

Sasco made it clear that, in his opinion, even the best of us have plenty of bad ideas, and we should only pursue the best of them.

"No one, no artist, has only great ideas. We all have tons of shitty ideas.

Sasco also wanted to make it clear that he could implement most of the ideas in Sidequest without breaking the budget.

"I searched for articles on the best cyberpunk and phantom liberty quests. Many of the articles on these lists are "the quests that had the smallest budgets," Sasco said.

"Working within limitations," he said, "you can create a lot of great things with clever ideas.

For more developer interviews and coverage, check out PC Gamer's GDC 2024 page.