Summary
- The Witcher 4’s development team prepared for the project by working on a special quest in The Witcher 3, serving as an initiation for new team members.
- Ciri will be taking the lead role in The Witcher 4, starting a new trilogy for the character.
The Witcher 4‘s narrative director has revealed what helped prepare the team for the development of the upcoming solo adventure of Ciri. Fans anticipating the release of The Witcher 4 have only started recovering from their excitement over their first peek at the game, but the team behind the game was actually getting back into the groove two years ago with a special quest added to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was first released in May 2015, leading Geralt on a quest that involved protecting his adopted daughter, Ciri, from the spectral warriors of The Wild Hunt. While Ciri was a playable character for some sections of that game, a new trailer released at The Game Awards 2024 in December revealed that she’s ready to step into the leading role for The Witcher 4.
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In late 2022, the In the Eternal Fire’s Shadow sidequest was added to The Witcher 3. This sidequest, which saw Geralt acquiring some long-lost equipment, was both a promotion for the game’s next-gen update and an opportunity to give players a canon reason for acquiring the armor previously worn by Henry Cavill in Netflix’s The Witcher streaming television series. In a recent social media post, Philipp Webber, who served as quest designer for The Witcher 3 and is picking up narrative director duties for The Witcher 4, confirmed that this quest was a starting point for some designers and writers who were just joining the series and served as their initiation before jumping into The Witcher 4‘s development cycle.
Late Witcher 3 Quest Was a Starting Point for The Witcher 4’s Development
Webber stated in his post that working on In the Eternal Fire’s Shadow as an initiation for new development team members “was the perfect start to getting back into the vibe.” This actually times up rather neatly with the timeline for development of The Witcher 4. The upcoming game, which will serve as the start of a second trilogy starring Ciri, was first announced in March 2022, about nine months before the release of the add-on sidequest in The Witcher 3. While it’s safe to say that some degree of planning was already in place before the game’s announcement, it gives a clearer picture of the origins of how the people creating the game got there.
The narrative director did not give any names of the team members who were initiated through the sidequest’s development, but it’s likely that at least some of them were transferred over from the Cyberpunk 2077 team, as CD Projekt Red’s big non-Witcher hit was first released in 2020. There’s also some speculation that The Witcher 4 may have a Phantom Liberty-like skill tree, and the timeline for the new members could lend credence to that theory.
The Witcher IV is a single-player, open-world RPG from CD PROJEKT RED. At the start of a new saga, players take on the role of Ciri, a professional monster slayer, and embark on a journey through a brutal dark-fantasy world. Powered by Unreal Engine 5, it aims to be the most immersive and ambitious open-world Witcher game to date.