The Witcher 4 has gotten some proper details as it enters full production. CD Projekt Red is a studio that has a very interesting reputation. The studio has delivered a number of incredible RPGs, including the acclaimed Witcher franchise. Even beyond RPGs, they managed to create a compelling card game from the Witcher universe called Gwent that went on to become its own standalone game as well. However, things got rocky when its most anticipated game to date, Cyberpunk 2077, had a really catastrophic release that resulted in mass refunds and years of updates trying to repair the game. However, to CD Projekt Red’s credit, the game itself was good, it was just bogged down by a lot of bugs and broken promises. Once it had released the game’s expansion, Phantom Liberty, and a big content update, the game was in much better shape and is well respected by a lot of people now.
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A lot of lessons were learned and will be applied to future games, including The Witcher 4. The game will be the studio’s next title and will be developed on Unreal Engine 5, as opposed to CD Projekt’s own in-house engine. This will allow the developer to hire more people who are already experienced with the tools, juggle more projects at once, and ideally, make games with a bit more efficiency. Next to nothing is known about The Witcher 4 right now. Geralt of Rivia will return in some capacity and there’s speculation the game will center around Ciri, but that’s about all we have. However, CD Projekt Red sat down with Eurogamer and revealed some interesting tidbits about The Witcher 4 as it ramps up development.
For starters, CEO Michał Nowakowski confirmed that The Witcher 4 will be “bigger” and “better than The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, noting that the studio doesn’t want to go worse or make smaller games.
“And the next game we do will not be smaller, and it will not be worse. So it will be better, bigger, greater than The Witcher 3, it will be better than Cyberpunk – because for us, it’s unacceptable [to launch that way]. We don’t want to go back.”
The developer also stated that it learned a lot from Cyberpunk 2077, namely about how to make a game for multiple platforms and how to market it. CD Projekt Red likely won’t develop with just PC in mind and make the console versions sort of an after-thought, it will be done more mindfully. Nowakowski also noted that he is overseeing the tech development, allowing him to review the work being done across all of the teams and speaking with/challenging the directors on the projects. This will allow them to stop moving forward if something isn’t right and give time to fix things. An example he gave is if the console builds aren’t performing properly, they won’t move on in production until it is sorted. Previously, they would just look at how it performed on PC and assume things were fine, but that’s no longer acceptable for CD Projekt Red.
As for how it’s marketed, CD Projekt won’t start fully marketing The Witcher 4 until it’s truly ready, likely about a year before it will release. He noted that they will still release teaser videos and other “crumbs” to get a discussion brewing before a proper marketing campaign designed to accrue pre-orders, but it seems like the large-scale, big budget ads and trailers will be reserved until the studio is confident in what it is putting out and when it is putting it out. Although The Witcher 4 was announced in 2022 with a codename, you won’t have to wait three or four years to play it once it gets its proper, full reveal.
I want to stress: it doesn’t mean we would not tease or drop some cool assets before [a full reveal],” said Nowakowski. “Because the marketing campaign, slightly earlier before the launch of the game, that’s different than the actual, say, ‘mass attack’. Mass attack is when you announce the date, you start collecting the pre-orders and it really is that race from that point, that moment, to the moment you launch the game.”
It will still likely be a couple of years before this “mass attack” of marketing for The Witcher 4 begins. The studio just entered full production on the game, but it currently has the biggest team of developers working on it across all of CDPR’s studios. Hopefully, we will get it before the end of this console generation.
