Digital Dragons 2026 - CD Projekt Red Explains the Importance of Game Documentation

While the first panels of Digital Dragons explained how to sell an idea to investors and how to push it onto stores, CD Projekt RED's presentation reminded us that, ultimately, video games are gigantic, fragile machines made of code and human memory. And when human memory fades, there's colossal pain.

We took our seats to listen to a panel with a most emblematic title, "OLD DOCS DIE HARD", led by two who are intimately familiar with its darkest secrets: Jarosław Rucinski (Technical Writer Team Lead) and Adrian Fulneczek (Senior Technical Writer) from the Polish giant.

A presentation that, with data and anecdotes in hand, laid bare the skeleton in the closet common to almost all major studios: the systematic, lazy, and devastating tendency to snub project documentation. A lesson CD Projekt learned the hard way, paying very high tolls in terms of time and money.

The "Coffee Method" and the Ghost of the First The Witcher

Often, documentation is seen by developers as the most boring thing in the world, useless bureaucracy that becomes obsolete after two weeks. Early in their history, during the time of The Witcher 1 and The Witcher 2, CD Projekt relied on the romantic charm of "oral conversations by the coffee machine." A beautiful, poetic, almost intimate approach. As long as the studio is small.

The problem arises when the person holding that knowledge decides to move on and leaves the company.

The result? "Currently, CD Projekt literally has no documentation for The Witcher 1," they candidly admitted on stage. There are a few scattered loose papers here and there, but nothing organic. The only official document remaining in the archives states that the very first chapter of the Witcher was supposed to be... a multiplayer game. Something that never happened, which makes that document essentially useless.

The harsh reality hit in 2022, when the studio announced its intention to make the Remake of The Witcher 1. Having not a shred of documentation, the only path left was the painful and very costly reverse engineering of the old code. Despite the collaboration with Fool’s Theory, a studio that includes some veterans of the original game on its team, the holes and gaps in development remain enormous. Preparing documents takes time and resources, agreed, but it's the only life insurance when you have to revisit a project years later.

The Leshen Enigma and the Wikipedia Screenshot

One might think that after the first chapter, the lesson would have been learned. After all, for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, attention was paramount: the team even created a highly detailed internal Wikipedia. The mistake, this time, was one of presumption: meticulously updating everything during development, only to close, archive, and forget once the game launched.

The short circuit became apparent when the company decided to release the REDkit for The Witcher 3, the tool to allow the community to mod the game using the proprietary engine. When it came time to publish the guidelines, the team realized there was nothing accessible anymore. A farcical treasure hunt among former employees ensued, until it turned out that someone, somewhere, had saved a screenshot of the old Wiki page.

From that image began a frenzied search through hundreds of gigabytes of archives to retrieve the original files, clean them up, redesign layouts, and categorize information. One example? When a manager asked for the design details of the Leshen (the famous forest monster), there were only images, but no lines of text explaining the creature's behavior or logic. A nightmare.

The 8,000 Pages of Cyberpunk 2077: When "Too Much" Is Too Much

We arrive at Cyberpunk 2077. Mindful of past disasters, Rucinski and his team decided to go big: 8-9 years of parallel development produced the monstrous beauty of 8,000 pages of documentation. Everything perfect? Not even close.

When the volume of data becomes so massive, keeping it updated takes a backseat to production deadlines. The documentation began to fragment, ending up divided across different clouds, different storage spaces, and with broken access permissions. Upon the announcement of the Phantom Liberty expansion, even external partners no longer knew where to turn to find the correct information.

The New Era: The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2 Travel in Sync

From the errors of giants, great solutions are born. Today, CD Projekt RED has completely revolutionized its pipeline for the upcoming, highly anticipated projects: The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2.

The new philosophy is based on two strict rules:

1. Single Sharing Space: No more scattered documents and lost files on personal OneDrives. Everything must reside in a single, centralized, and accessible platform.

2. Mandatory Check: Writing documentation is no longer an extra, spare-time task. Every single phase of the development process now requires a check and update of the documentation, making it effectively a "living" and integral part of the work.

This ensures total transparency between teams. If the team working on The Witcher 4 finds a technical solution or an innovative workflow, the Cyberpunk 2 team can retrieve and implement it in real-time, without reinventing the wheel.
Furthermore, for a company that today boasts offices located all over the world with radically different time zones, writing becomes the only true bridge for communication without the obligation of exhausting asynchronous meetings.

In Conclusion: Saving 25% of Development Time

The moral of the story, Rucinski and Fulneczek printed it on the big screen at the end of the panel: following a correct documentation policy at the moment can save up to 25% of a development team's total time. A quarter of the production time that designers, programmers, and artists usually spend simply searching for information that someone forgot to write.

Behind the multi-million dollar masterpieces we play on our screens lie mammoth organizational challenges. And CD Projekt's lesson is a warning to the entire industry: old documents die hard, but their absence can kill a project long before its market debut.