Two noises echoed down the halls of The Witcher 4’s development last weekend, one of which filled me with hope, and the other with dread. The first was that the game will not be revealed until it’s just a couple of years from release – an approach more studios seem to be taking, and better for managing expectations while limiting pressure on developers. Given how anticipation for Cyberpunk 2077 swelled to toxic levels thanks to its very early teaser one month shy of eight years out from launch, that seems like a lesson learned.
The second was that The Witcher 4 will be “bigger and better” than Cyberpunk 2077. These may just be buzzwords, but they seem like unwise ones. Better? Sure, that’s Marketing 101, and Cyberpunk 2077 launched in an infamously broken state. Even once fixed, it was still a more shallow world than we were promised, with plenty of features trimmed off along the way. But bigger? We’re falling back into the same old habits.
The Witcher 4 Cannot Overpromise
I don’t have too hard of a time believing The Witcher 4 will be bigger, but that’s not the point. It’s a fantasy game likely to take place in a sprawling region, not an urban-set adventure confined to a single city. Night City is a large map with many different corners, but it is a single place and (in theory) densely packed. The version of Cyberpunk 2077 that doesn’t launch until it is fully ready, with third-person and wall-running and interactable buildings, makes this confined space feel far larger. The version we got takes place in a decent sized city with a lot of corridors dressed up as buildings.
The Witcher 4 will have more open plains, with forests and towns and keeps scattered across the map. To walk from one end to the other will probably take longer than it would in Cyberpunk 2077. That might already be the case for The Witcher 3, which itself had an impressive map. It’s not that I don’t think CD Projekt Red can back this up, it’s that now it has to.
You cannot say ‘we won’t be promoting the game until we’re sure it’s ready’ then immediately follow it up with ‘it will be more ambitious than our last game which we slowly peeled features away from mid-development and then still crashed and burned because we were too ambitious’. I’m already giving the team a pass on the whole ‘we won’t reveal a game we have in fact already revealed and have previously discussed’ thing, but we need a bit of perspective here.
More Importantly, It Cannot Underdeliver
I don’t have much of a Roach in this race. I suspect my reaction to The Witcher 4 will be “yeah that’s nice” and then move on with my life. While I recognise the quality of The Witcher 3 and respect those who proclaim it one of the best ever to do it, I never had much of a connection with it. I’m less excited for The Witcher 4 than a lot of people because of that, and despite the mixed messaging, maybe this is what people want to hear.
But telling people what they want to hear is what brought CDPR to this point. The ‘no trailer until it’s two years out’ is a factual thing it can hold on to, and the idea that its fantasy RPG that allows you to explore a region will be bigger and better than a broken game set in a single city is not exactly breaking news. It’s the fact that CDPR has started to bang this drum that sets off warning sirens.
I don’t know the best way to promote The Witcher 4, but after the team had the wisdom to kick the can down the road, I suspect ‘chase after the can and kick it back’ is not the answer. Cyberpunk 2077’s reputation has changed a lot over the past four years – I sank in 250 hours myself, and can appreciate a lot of what it offers, even if I think it is several rungs below where others place it and where the studio was aiming for. People lapped up Phantom Liberty’s “the game is fixed!” aggression, even if many of the non-bug issues still remained.
Does The Witcher 4 promo tour act as an apology for Cyberpunk 2077? A victory lap for its recovery from the brink? Does it ignore Night City almost entirely and bill itself as a sequel to The Witcher 3, considered by many to be the greatest fantasy game in existence? I’m not sure, and deciding to hang fire until the game is two years out is a far more measured approach.
But if the ‘bigger and better’ line is a sign of things to come, it doesn’t feel like CDPR has learned much in these past four years. That will only matter if The Witcher 4 can’t back it up, but it doesn’t seem smart to make ‘this is the greatest game of all time’ the benchmark, especially not after that blew up in your face last time.
- Top Critic Rating:93/100
