The Witcher 4 has big shoes to fill, as The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was a critical and commercial success, winning rave reviews and selling more than 60 million copies. Narrative director Philipp Weber was asked in a recent interview how CD Projekt Red can top The Witcher 3. Weber replied, “I’m like, ‘Yeah, how are we going to do that?'”
Weber went on to tell GamesRadar that a video game, like any creative endeavor, is “subjective,” so instead of trying to outdo The Witcher 3, the team is trying to do justice to The Witcher 3 by embracing the vibes of how the game was made. He said the studio wants to “take the philosophy we had during The Witcher 3–how to make a game, how to really care about these things, how to tell stories–and keep that philosophy.”
The Witcher 4 is a “true sequel,” so CD Projekt Red will also trying to answer “new questions.” Otherwise, The Witcher 4 runs the risk of “just redoing what we did before,” Weber said.
“I think it’s really trying to have that healthy mix of really moving forward and also trying out some new things, but doing justice to what was there, not trying to beat it,” he said.
Before this, Weber said when the team was making The Witcher 3, there was “good creative chaos” going on at the studio. In practice, what this meant was that developers were working in a “vibe-based” manner and getting stuff done even if it was outside of their specific job remit.
“Sometimes I like to just say, ‘Get it done. Do it dirty. Do it the way we used to do it!'” Weber said.
The Witcher 4 doesn’t have a release date yet, but it’s not expected to launch until 2027 at the soonest. It’s one of multiple games in development now at CD Projekt. Some of the others include Cyberpunk 2, a remake of the original Witcher, and a game produced in partnership with Saudi Arabia.
The Witcher 4 focuses its story on Ciri, and this has generated some amount of debate and controversy. Some people are calling the game “woke,” but Geralt’s voice actor has slammed these critics. In other news, a new tech demo for the game debuted earlier this year, and while it looked very impressive, the developers want people to know it wasn’t actually the game.
