Development on The Witcher 4 is going full steam ahead in its development right now. In a recent episode of CD Projekt RED’s AnsweRED podcast, senior communication manager Paweł Burza, along with game director Sebastian Kalemba, environment art director Michał Janiszewski and engineering production manager Jan Hermanowicz have spoken about how the studio is trying to make the game’s world as immersive as possible.
According to the team, a lot of the game’s development work is focused on making its world a believable one with various aspects like worldbuilding. Hermanowicz spoke about how “the environment, the characters, and the way that everything is laid out on the level itself.” He continued, “Everything needs to be consistent.”
“It is important for us for the player to get the world [as] believable as possible,” Janiszewski said.
“We have a huge team that is taking care of the believability, because, like you were saying, even the line of the trees need to be specifically created,” he continued. “So we have some tools that they are supporting us, and we are building inside of our worldbuilding team, tools that will make our work a little bit faster, and a little bit more, I would say easier, to populate the whole world.”
This focus on making the world of The Witcher 4 a believable one for players matches the statements of Kalemba from back in January. In an interview, Kalemba said that the studio wants every NPC in The Witcher 4 to look like they have lives of their own.
“We have this rule to make every single [The Witcher 4] NPC looking like they’re living, with their own story,” Kalemba said. “We’re definitely pushing the quality of NPC – the way they look, their behavior, their facial performance – as much as possible because we want to make an even more immersive experience than we used to,” the director added. “We are trying to push the bar here.”
Narrative director Phillipp Weber had also spoken about CD Projekt RED prioritising an immersive world for The Witcher 4 back in December. He mentioned that, while the upcoming game’s map will be big, it doesn’t necessarily need to be bigger than what we saw in The Witcher 3. Instead, the studio wants to make the game’s world denser, more immersive, and more systematic.
While the studio is hard at work on the game, it had confirmed last month that fans of the franchise shouldn’t hold their breaths for a release soon. Back in March, the studio revealed through its quarterly fiscal briefing that The Witcher 4 will only be released in 2027 at the earliest.
“We are not going to announce the precise launch date for the game yet,” said CD Projekt CFO Piotr Nielubowicz. “All we could share now to give more visibility to investors is that the game will not be launched within the time frame of the first target for the incentive program, which ends December 31, 2026.”
The Witcher 4 is being developed for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Check out its original announcement trailer from back in December where we also learned that Ciri will be taking over from Geralt as the protagonist of the game.
