# Wiki Stories Letter 9 – The Witcher 3 - Hearts of Stone # Facts: - Game - The Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone - Released on October 13, 2015 - Developed by CD Projekt Red; Published by WB Games - IGN’s Wiki Team - Jon Ryan and myself - My contributions - Side Quests, Hidden Treasures (Clean-Up) - Pay - $250 (base Witcher 3 was $900) - Time Spent Playing: 34-54 hours for Hearts of Stone; 174 hours total for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. --- # The Value of Gold Back to writing about *The Witcher 3* already? While the summer of 2015 was almost entirely Witcher coverage, the release of the first big DLC *Hearts of Stone* kept me on the beat well into the fall. It helped tip the scales of pay just over a grand and let me stay in the lands of Novigrad and Velen a smidge while longer. I was (and still am) concerned with writing about the two DLC expansions that I worked on. When I write so extensively on the base game, I’m worried how much is actually left for me to explore with the DLC in these letters. These games can blur together in the throes of writing. Tack on seven years of separation and it becomes difficult to parse out what were the base game assignments and what were the DLC tasks. This swirl of wiki memories is why I have been rummaging around my inbox to find old emails. It’s as close to flipping through an old journal as I can get. And for Hearts of Stone, it turns out my memories are once again off-base from my actual assignment. *Wiki Stories* has opened my eyes to the fact I was essentially working on *The Witcher 3* from its release in May 2015 through that November. That’s seven months of one game. Granted, this was (probably) on and off in the summer. I just kept the *Witcher* train rolling. *Until Dawn* came in August to give me a break from slaying monsters to running from them. The entirety of my *Witcher* work is just a pool of muddy plains and monster blood. Separation is impossible. If you had asked me a week ago what I did for *Hearts of Stone*, I would have immediately said story quests. My brain would have said that was the logical choice given my assignment for the base game. It’s also the only part of the DLC I have any recollection of. What my brain forgot is that the predominate method of delivery for early codes for multiplatform games was (probably still is) PC. Your boy was operating off an 11’‘ MacBook Air with a itty-bitty dual core i7. Even if *The Witcher 3* had a macOS port, that little laptop would have melted.[^1] When the developer hands you PC codes, you try and make that work first, before going back to ask for console codes (if those are even ready). The IGN crew was handling *Hearts of Stone* in the beginning of October. By the 15th, Jon Ryan asked if I could come in and do some clean up for the side quests and hidden treasures. > Hope you’ve been well - have you checked out Hearts of Stone yet? I just finished up our primary coverage on it and it’s a great expansion. > > AND because we’re all slammed here and have to move to other projects, I wanted to see if you’d be interested in picking up the slack that our lazy-good-for-nothing asses can’t cover. There’s a few items we’ll need to cover in Hearts of Stone, as well as some general TW3 wiki cleanup that needs doing. > > We can offer you $250 for the coverage, and there’s a few feature-ey videos I’d like to have you do that will probably be featured on IGN’s front page. Hit us back as soon as you can, thanks! Re-reading that email in 2022, I couldn’t remember specifically why this was being pawned off on me to wrap up. It’s tough to change writers mid-guide. All it took was me to look back at the [Fall 2015 games](https://www.theverge.com/2015/8/31/9231789/new-xbox-ps4-games-fall-2015-fallout-4-halo-5-cod-zelda) to see why Witcher 3 DLC was dropped by the full-time team. Both *Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate* and *Halo 5: Guardians* were out just weeks after *Hearts of Stone*. In November, there were the releases of *Rise of the Tomb Raider*, *Star Wars: Battlefront*—oh and a little game called *Fallout 4*. IGN’s eyes were (rightly) onto the next major cash cow in the realm of advertising and SEO. I was paid a whopping $250 to wrap up this chunk of the guide. Looking at my original estimate for my time spent playing, that’d pan out to $5-8.30 an hour. Wanting to double check myself, I pulled up Hearts of Stone on [How Long to Beat](https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=30003) and they claim 100% takes around 18 or so hours. Rounding it up to 20 hours for easier maths, the pay would have equaled $12.50 an hour. If you take my total pay and divide it by my total play time across the entire guide, I was paid $6.61 an hour, solely for play. The data I do not have (to my chagrin) is the time spent writing the guide, chopping up the videos, and publishing said material. Let’s say the actual guide work took half the play time (I would suspect it took more); we are then looking at $4.40 an hour.[^2] This train of thought may sound familiar—it departed the station back with my *Witcher 3* letter—and on board that train is my college-aged contentment cruising along. I know pointing out these numbers may come off as complaining. That is not how I felt at the time, especially in 2015, when this side hustle was just getting off the ground. I was valuing the experience and connections more than the dollar amount anyway. # Hidden Treasure As for the actual work itself, I really remember none of the specifics. It’s strange. I spent so much time and energy pouring into this work, and yet my memories have a generic quality to them. No doubt this is due to a combination of bits. Obviously, time is the key one. So much of it has passed with no real anchor to this particular time. The other is a total lack of proper journaling in my life at this time. Toward the end of my wiki freelance work, I at the very least chronicled my work throughly. Since then, I keep small notebooks to write my ideas and feelings about my personal work.[^3] I kept a thorough journal during my writing of *[[Chasing the Stick - The History of Naughty Dog during the PS4 Era|Chasing the Stick]]* and jot down nearly all my ideas for *[[Chapter Select]]*. It is wildly helpful in the creative process. If I could pass along this bit advice to you dear reader, it would be chronicle your creative process. I look forward to some day when I thank my past-self and can learn even more from my processes then. Coming back to this period in my life right now is part of the drive behind *Wiki Stories*. It’s better late than never, right? Thank goodness I kept the written guides and never delete my emails. Trying to dig all these memories and emotions accurately is like I buried them long ago and am trying to find the treasure without a map. Vague recollections bob up to the surface, but the exact coordinates were lost long ago. # The Actual Work Now for the actual work I did. My Scrivener file indicates that the bulk of this was, essentially, X marks the spot treasure hunting. It has been so long since I have even seen gameplay from *The Witcher 3* that I don’t recall how hidden treasure quests presented themselves. Reading one such hunt just now tells me that players would find a key or a map in one spot, which would lead them to the treasure in another. Rather straight forward on paper. The side quests too seem rather simple on the page. Perhaps my writing is too lean, giving off the impression of simplicity. These quests and treasures range from two paragraphs to five. Unlike story quests and their related, meaty side stories, the optional story in *Hearts of Stone* appears to be boney. My work appears to have been a checklist of pages and videos to make with little challenge. They were seem mindless. Sort of like the quests themselves in open-world, checkbox games. Sometimes writing a guide for an open world game is just like playing one. # Thoughts & Impressions I feel like trying to recall my experience writing the guide for this particular game reflects what I’d remember now about said game. I remember the plot revolving around a wedding and a magic man. I enjoyed the lower-stakes from the main story. There was a fight on the beach? I seem to recall CD Projekt Red digging more into character, which I appreciated. Beyond that, it was more *Witcher*? Overall, the game is a great one and this DLC makes it better. You can’t really buy the game today without this content being included, so there’s no financial barrier to entry. Strange to realize that a game expansion I touted as excellent feels completely foreign to me now. Perhaps if I can’t recall the game and how it truly made me feel when I played it, it wasn’t all that great the begin with. ![[wiki-stories-art-1080_v2.jpg]] --- [^1]: But if The Witcher 3 can run on a Nintendo Switch… [^2]: In 2015, the minimum wage in Florida was $8.05 and in California it was $10. Also, I was withholding 33% of my wiki income for taxes. Taxes for The Witcher 3 alone was $380. Sheesh. [^3]: My 9-to-5 rarely requires this type of pouring out onto the page.