While we’ve heard quite a few things about The Witcher 4, especially when it comes to the upcoming title’s visuals thanks to its recent tech demo video, narrative director Philipp Weber has also spoken about how CD Projekt RED is tackling the game’s story. In an interview with GamesRadar, Weber spoke about how the studio learned lessons from the development of The Witcher 3.
“Sometimes we have new things – you know, new features – but the core stuff? It’s the same philosophy,” Weber said about writing for the new title. In this, he went on to say that the studio has also been “remembering the lessons from The Witcher 3 that maybe we even forgot, or changed a little bit.”
According to Weber, a lot of these lessons come down to giving players appropriate consequences for the choices that they make. He spoke about how the studio had previously tried its hand at subtlety and more naturalistic writing when it came to presenting consequences, and how the studio wants to bring that back, while also giving players more obvious hints that their actions have had consequences.
“We want to make sure that when we have consequences, there really is a good reason for the player to see them,” he explained. “Sometimes in the past we would try to be very subtle and very naturalistic about consequences because often a character doesn’t tell you ‘Well, I’m doing this now because you said this two hours ago’. That can feel unnatural, so we try to avoid that, but the result is that then for a lot of people it’s invisible that this is a consequence at all.”
“In The Witcher 3 we had a very good balance of still being natural about it, but usually you always knew when there was a consequence for your actions,” Weber continued. “That’s an example of a lesson where we looked back at i and said ‘OK, we have to be able to hit that one again’, because choice and consequence is one of the standards that we have and want to uphold, and I think The Witcher 3 did it perfectly.”
The Witcher 4 was announced back in December 2024 during The Game Awards with a trailer. Since then, we haven’t really seen much about the title other than its Unreal Engine tech demo. However, technical engineer Jan Hermanowicz has recently reiterated that the tech demo doesn’t necessarily represent the full game in a bid for CD Projekt RED to be “extremely transparent.”
We have learned a few things about the highly-anticipated RPG, however, including the fact that Ciri will be taking over from Geralt of Rivia as the new protagonist of the franchise. Weber had also previously stated that The Witcher 4 won’t have much in the way of fetch quests. Rather, the studio wants to meet player expectations when it comes to quest design, especially when it comes to deeper storytelling through these quests.
The Witcher 4 is being developed for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
