This is also intertwined with how the game rewards you. Besides cash and crafting ingredients, your main form of major reward will be weapons and armor. You can get these items from effectively every chest at the end of a dungeon, contract monsters and guarded chests. The items you find like this are likely to be high tier, and thus, very valuable. But you find so many that they’re not guaranteed to be better than your current equipment, especially not if you are using the current level of witcher gear. Thus, you are likely to collect it, and then sell it to the next smith or armorer you find. Once you start doing this, the money starts piling up fast.

To be fair, the game does have money sinks, very good ones at that. But they’re insufficient. Once you learn the ropes, no amount of expenses can keep you from making more money than you could practically spend. Buying gwent cards? Good to start, but they become relatively cheap as the game goes on. Going back to the armorer for constant repairs? Annoying at first, but they will soon become trivial as you pick up more repair tools than you will ever need. Buying out a tavern’s entire stock of Rivian kriek, going on a bender while streaking across Novigrad and consorting with every courtesan in the city? Not to say I’ve necessarily tried it, but nothing can make a dent in Geralt’s monstrous, massive, insatiable… ahem, income.

ABSOLUTELY. NOTHING.

It also cheapens the stakes of those big contracts. Not the ones you get from a random peasant, but the game-spanning contracts that drive the main quest and the stories of each expansion. It’s hard to feel as though Geralt is compelled to take on these huge missions when the reward is a tenth of what he made in the process. Zoltan’s get rich quick scheme especially comes off as cheap when Geralt hands over that much to get his armor polished every week.

This isn’t a knock against Witcher 3 in particular. RPG economies are ludicrously difficult to balance, especially the open world ones (see Elder Scrolls). Furthermore CDPR probably prioritized a functioning and more forgiving system over one that could leave players stranded. That being said, here are a few wild suggestions for the future, dedicated to anyone who wants to make their RPG economy feel immersive.

A Few Wild(Hunt) Suggestions

The lack of long term money sinks are a big reason for why player fortunes spiral out of control so quickly. Yet NPCs can’t make it rich so easily. Why? Well, unlike the player, NPCs are bound by the narrative rules of the world. That means room and board, as well as any expenses. You would never have thought that the nomadic, rootless existence of the typical RPG protagonist is the path to riches, but it turns out property ownership is a tactic of the bourgeoisie to keep the proletariat down.

Snark aside, an immersive economy would require bringing these considerations to gameplay. If you want a semi-survivalist take, (think the Frostfall mod for Skyrim) then charging for necessary food and shelter will get the player roleplaying fast. But not all RPGs benefit from survival elements. In their absence, TW3 gets the idea right. Item condition, supplies and the like require that you return to civilization often, to gear back up and take stock of the situation, not just to sell your loot. Here, the tweak that would make you more dependent and considerate of towns is how much you can carry.

While the weight based system is relatively simple to comprehend, it’s also easy to take advantage of it. The stakes drop in combat when you have enough supplies on you refill your potions literally hundreds of times. In its stead, I would suggest the grid based inventory. The first Witcher game employed this system, and while it had no shortage of issues, it successfully disincentivized carrying around a dozen bulky weapons to sell to the next merchant. It also makes more sense than having infinite pocket space.

Further disincentivization could be achieved by tweaking what merchants buy. Sure, an armorer would love to sell you a new cuirass, but they wouldn’t be all too excited about buying one from you. Your local pharmacist wouldn’t be pumped to buy the drugs you made in your basement. Reducing the player’s ability to indiscriminately sell specialty items to anyone but pawnbrokers would mean the world makes a bit more sense. After all, who’s buying Skelliger armor in Toussaint?

Alright, so I’ve talked about what to take out, but we can’t make a good system just by removing elements. We need to fill in the gaps. If we can’t sell our foe’s bloodstained armor to Joe Smith, then how will we make money? More immersive ways of course! With TW3, Geralt’s nominal source of income is monster hunting. This would be less a task of changing the prices of contracts as one of rebalancing the economy as a whole to allow the player to get through the game primarily on contract money. Not everything needs to within that price range, as witchers are supposed to be poor in general. However, this would place value on events such as brawls and gwent tournaments, where money really is on the line.

Those are the big things to look at in order to make an RPG economy more ‘realistic’. All that being said, I feel the comings-on of a piece on what ‘realism’ means for games, so stay tuned, and follow if you’re interested.