When Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, the game director of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and secondary director on Cyberpunk 2077, left CD Projekt Red in 2021, he did so under a dark cloud, accused of workplace bullying. A four month-long external investigation cleared him of any charges but the taint of the accusations linger still.
“It’s always difficult,” Tomaszkiewicz told me when we met in London last week. “It’s always difficult because when stuff like this happens, it’s really difficult to show people that it wasn’t like this, because people like to assume some things.”
When Tomaszkiewicz left CD Projekt Red, he acknowledged in an email that “a lot of people are feeling fear, stress or discomfort when working with me”, and he apologised “for all the bad blood I have caused”. He promised to work on himself and set about changing his behaviour.
Reflecting on the issue last week, Tomaszkiewicz told me problems seemed to arise when CD Projekt Red grew rapidly in size following the release of The Witcher 3, in 2015. That game was made on average by 160 people, he said – a figure that jumped to 205 closer to release, when the then-small Cyberpunk 2077 team was pulled in to help. By the time Tomaszkiewicz left CD Projekt Red in 2021, however, there were more than 1000 people working there.
During Cyberpunk 2077’s unwieldy development, CD Projekt Red became linked with a culture of crunch, but the studio’s intense way of working does stretch back to the beginning of The Witcher series of games, which of course Tomaszkiewicz was a part of. “For half-a-year we were working 12-hour days every day, all weekends, all the time,” lead character artist Paweł Mielniczuk once told me while recalling The Witcher 1’s development.
In 2017, not long after The Witcher 3 as a project was put to bed, CD Projekt Red responded to apparent low studio morale by saying, “This approach to making games is not for everyone,” so this was clearly an issue before Cyberpunk 2077 development got properly underway. Perhaps it was just a more visible issue when lots of new people joined the company.
Working in teams of that size made it hard to know the people you were working with, Tomaszkiewicz said to me, which made it especially hard for people to pull together during the more strenuous development periods. “The problem was – I was analysing it – that people feel differently when you are anonymous for them because the company is huge and [they don’t necessarily know you]. The stress is not comparable to the situation when you work with them arm in arm every day,” he said.
“I decided that I want to open my own company and do things differently,” he added. “I want to have the maximum amount of people [similar to] how we had it in The Witcher 3, because at that time, I knew everyone, full name and surname, and in our company it’s totally the same.”
The company he’s referring to is Rebel Wolves, which he co-founded in 2022 alongside a handful of other former CD Projekt Red staff, including writer Jakub Szamalek, artist Bartłomiej Gaweł, animator Tamara Zawada, and a few others from the Polish game development scene.
Rebel Wolves currently has 155 people working on The Blood of Dawnwalker, its debut half-human, half-vampire role-playing game – almost exactly the same number of people that worked on The Witcher 3 for the bulk of its development. Given the studio’s heritage, it’s no surprise The Blood of Dawnwalker passes more than a passing resemblance to The Witcher games, in tone as well as appearance, but there are notable and significant differences.
“I know everyone,” Tomaszkiewicz continued. “I work with them every day, not only to feedback and review their stuff, but doing the stuff with them. I implement the quests, also. I’m scripting the combat and the opponents.
“I want to be the leader not the boss,” he said. “I want to work with them and show direction and help them to go in this particular direction, not be somewhere there in Olympus and not have the camaraderie with the people. I want to feel this crazy fire as I felt it in The Witcher 3, The Witcher 2, in The Witcher 1. And later, when the team was too big, I lost it somewhere. And right now I have it back.”
The Blood of Dawnwalker will be released on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series S/X sometime in 2026.
