‘We’ll call you back’: BioWare’s first impression of The Witcher 1 was a bad demo, followed by CDPR declaring that they wanted to ‘create the best RPG game ever’

Cool story of gamedev companies supporting each other.
Some parts of the article:

I presented the demo, and this demo wasn't great," Badowski says. "Afterwards, Ray and Greg ask the question, 'Okay, so what do you want to achieve?' We said that we would like to be the biggest, the best RPG team in the industry. We would like to create the best RPG game ever."

At this point, CDPR only had 15 people in the team, with the hope of expanding to 35 in the not-so-distant future. Regardless of how hardworking everyone clearly was, it was undoubtedly an awkward moment around the table. After a bad demo, the realisation that it was only a small team working on this project, and the declaration that despite all of this, they wanted to make the best RPG ever. All BioWare could muster up was a "We'll call you back".

But luckily, the lasting impression must've been a good one, as eventually BioWare did get back in contact with CDPR. "They were super supportive,"

The engine that they ended up getting was the Aurora Engine, which powered BioWare's Neverwinter Nights series of fantasy RPGs. But those at CDPR still had their work cut out for them. "We wrote 80-something percent of the code," Badowski says. "We had no multiplayer, we removed so many, so many elements from the engine, and the render was completely new."