The Witcher 3 team cranked out 7,000 new animations for the DLC packs - all in a single year

The Witcher 3 team worked even harder on the DLC than the core game.

The Witcher 3 has two excellent DLC expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine - both of which were developed and released over the year following the original RPG's release.

This rapid turnaround on some fairly hefty content is even more impressive when we get a look behind the scenes. PC Gamer has a report on a GDC 2017 presentation on how The Witcher 3 DLC team managed to get it all done.

While workflow management is not of huge interest to we on the sidelines, some of the revelations are, like the fact that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was built with 16,000 unique animations. Meanwhile, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine between them used a further 7,000.

That's close to half as many as the core game, and it gets even more impressive with a few comparisons. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was in development for three and a half years, while the DLC was built in just one year. Also, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is about 200 hours long, while the two expansions are about 50 hours long when combined, meaning they have a much higher density of unique animations than the base game.

Just to put a cherry on it, the team responsible for The Witcher 3's DLC did all this without much programming support, as that group had already moved on to Cyberpunk. It's a good thing the tools developed over the past few years were so stable and adaptable, then.

Hit the source link to read more about The Witcher 3 DLC's amazing animations, including discussion of how animation was important to characters like Olgierd and Detlaff - or just watch the video above and make admiring noises.