INTERVIEW: CD Projekt Red wants The Witcher 4 to be a ‘deeper’ open world, not just a larger one

The Game Awards 2024 opened with the long-awaited first trailer for The Witcher 4. The sequel to the game that solidified CD Projekt Red as a top-tier studio is now in full production, telling the story of Ciri, the second protagonist from The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

VGC recently spoke to narrative director Phillipp Weber and executive producer Małgorzata Mitręga about the return of the franchise, what lessons were learned from Cyberpunk 2077, and their plans to elevate the RPG space in the same way Witcher 3 did a decade ago.

But first, we wanted to discuss part of the reaction to The Game Awards reveal trailer that has left a somewhat sour note on discussions surrounding the game. While millions of fans have watched the trailer and at the time of writing and it’s received over 250,000 likes on YouTube, not all the reaction was positive.

While there are extreme opinions on the fringes of gaming circles making bad-intentioned photoshops of Ciri, demanding she’s injected with more sex appeal and robbed of any resemblance to a real human, there are other, genuine Witcher fans who are disappointed that they won’t be playing as Geralt this time around.

“I think we definitely knew it could be controversial for some people because of course, in the previous three Witcher games Geralt was the protagonist and I think everyone really loved playing as Geralt,” said Weber.

“I really loved playing as Geralt, so I think we’re aware that if some people think right now that they would still prefer to be Geralt, I do think that’s a legitimate concern, so if this is where that concern is coming from, that’s valid.”

The official upload of the Witcher 4 trailer currently has 3.7 million views. 250K people have “liked” the video on YouTube, with 25K leaving “dislike” ratings on the trailer.

“The best thing that we can do, and I think this is really our goal, is to prove that with Ciri, we can do a lot of interesting things so we can really make it worth it because this decision to have Ciri as a protagonist wasn’t made yesterday, we started making this a very long time ago,” Weber continued.

“Ciri was already being set up as a second protagonist in the Andrzej Sapkowski novels and as the second playable character in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, so for us, it really was the natural evolution of what we’ve already been making for so long. Also for people who really love Geralt, it lets us honour the ending that Geralt had in The Witcher 3 and in Blood and Wine.”

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt featured several playable sequences as Ciri. When CD Projekt first confirmed that it was working on a new entry in the franchise, it did so by teasing a new wolf medallion, different to the one worn by Geralt. It should have come as a surprise to little that she’d lead the next entry.

“The best thing that we can do, and I think this is really our goal, is to prove that with Ciri, we can do a lot of interesting things”

“At the same time, of course, with Ciri being at the beginning of her journey as a Witcher, it also lets us tell new stories of what it means to become a Witcher,” Weber continued. “So, for those people who are worried right now, if that comes from a place of passion, I want to say I think the next time we show the game, our goal is to show and prove that Ciri can be a worthy protagonist for The Witcher 4.”

Executive producer Małgorzata Mitręga added: “We are also overwhelmed by so many people liking the choice, being excited for it, understanding where it came from. Also actually doing a little bit of our job, the community itself is doing the explanation on why it’s the correct choice.

“Everyone has the right to have an opinion, and we do believe it comes from the passion for our games and I think the best answer for that will be the game itself when the game is released.”

Mitręga joined CD Projekt to work on Cyberpunk 2077, following a decade at Techland working on the Dying Light franchise. While the redemption story for CD Projekt’s other franchise is remarkable, when The Witcher 4 launches, few will be able to forget the prerelease hype and spectacular fall that surrounded Cyberpunk 2077.

This time, CD Projekt says it’s being much more deliberate about what it shows from The Witcher 4 and when. “There were a lot of lessons,” said Mitręga. “How do we work within the team? How do we communicate honestly, how do we have transparency.”

Despite the reveal trailer, it doesn’t seem likely we’ll see more of The Witcher 4 soon. “We are not yet starting the marketing campaign. We want to remind our fans that we are coming back with The Witcher, we also want to introduce it to the new audience.

“There were a lot of lessons [from Cyberpunk 2077]. How do we work within the team? How do we communicate honestly, how do we have transparency.”

“This is just a bit, we have more plans for the future, the total take the lesson on starting the real campaign much closer to release when everything is settled, and I think that Phantom Liberty has shown nicely the direction of change that we are going and has worked well.”

That “bit” left us excited to see more. The trailer, which teased that it was being rendered on an “unannounced Nvidia GPU,” set imaginations running wild. CDPR fans have had five solid years of teases and trailers for Night City-tinged content, making a return to the dark world of The Witcher all the more of a compelling tone switch.

“I think it’s part of the tradition of The Witcher that we tackled really difficult themes,” Weber mused, when we asked about the team’s storytelling ambitions for The Witcher 4. “We never want to give easy answers. We always want to raise difficult questions, and that also means tackling difficult stuff, but also tackling it with care.”

The Witcher 3’s side quests were so incredibly well-received due to their ability to flex between something light-hearted like a swashbuckling adventure or Geralt endlessly chasing the ladies to much heavier themes. Everything felt grounded in the same universe and tied to the same characters. A groundedness the team wants to replicate.

“The importance of our stories is that they are always connected to the world,” said Mitręga. “It’s not just like going, ‘oh, this is the problem that we want to tackle,’ no, it feeds into the overall story, to the world, to the region’s problems, so we always put those there for the context of the game.”

For some, The Witcher 4 will be their introduction to the franchise. “There are many people that might be ready to play Witcher 4 once it comes out that were children when The Witcher 3 was being made,” Weber said with a smile.

“I think it’s part of the tradition of The Witcher that we tackled really difficult themes. We never want to give easy answers. We always want to raise difficult questions”

CD Projekt is aware of the task that faces it, but it’s also looking forward to what is largely a fresh start with Witcher 4, which it considers the starting point of its newest saga. The challenge, it tells us, is balancing introducing those new players while respecting legacy fans.

“We want to ensure that when The Witcher 4 releases, this is a game that a completely new audience can enjoy, but a the same time, we are, of course, also aware… and this is why we call the game The Witcher 4, that this is a sequel to the three previous games,” said Weber.

“You can rest assured that we take this seriously, this is a sequel to those experiences fully, and of course that also means that we do respect the stories and the characters that were introduced in those games before, we want to marry those two things.”

Expectations for CD Projekt couldn’t be higher. Since entering the rarified air at the top table of game development with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, every move made by the studio has been studied by fans. That fan devotion is part of the reason Cyberpunk’s disappointing launch felt so personal to many. The Witcher 4 now lives with the expectation of being the sequel to an incredibly beloved RPG, and CD Projekt’s chance at proving it can still deliver at launch.

“We are all players,” said Mitręga. “We are doing it for our players, we think all the time about the experience, what the world needs and what we want to tell the world. We’re making the game that we as fans of the series would want to play.

“We want to make a really good story, we’re not thinking about the reaction, we have a message we want to tell, we want to touch the player and tell them something important and stay there with them. On the business side, we do think about the audience we are reaching; we check the market and audience, but when it comes to the team, we are mostly focused on the goal of the game being delivered.”

“We are all players. We are doing it for our players, we think all the time about the experience, what the world needs and what we want to tell the world.”

Weber nods in agreement, “We don’t want to break those core qualities that we established in the previous three Witcher games, but we do want to improve in other areas where we really feel like it’s something where we can grow.”

“The open world doesn’t necessarily need to be bigger and bigger and bigger, but the open world can be deeper and more immersive, more systematic. I think that’s something that’s really exciting to look at.”

In 2024, budgets for games of The Witcher 4’s size continued to balloon, something the team at CD Projekt is aware of. The team is also conscious of the fact that they don’t have infinite time to work on the game, and now that they’ve shown it, the pressure from fans to see more and more, and play it as soon as they can will only grow.

“I would say making a feature for the game is not about making the best feature ever, its about making the best feature in the time you have,” laughs Mitręga. “It’s more about the ambition of having really complex and immersive things going on and not necessarily the actual size. Of course, it’s a single-player, open-world action RPG; it’s going to be big.”

On that note, we wanted to know how the team was approaching The Witcher 4 in terms of scale. Open-world RPGs have not only gotten larger in terms of budgets, they’ve ballooned in content in the past decade, too. Maps filled with icons are a dream for some fans, but for others, there are simply not enough hours in the day to play something that feels endless.

For Weber, he wants to focus on the quality of the content rather than scale for the sake of scale. “We always say that whatever we do we want to have it be meaningful and it means it can be only so much that is actually meaningful and interesting. Once we would have to start repeating stuff I think that’s when it’s too big.”