Latest news with #TheWitcher4
Express Tribune
29-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
The Witcher 4 dev shares concern over meeting expectations set by The Witcher 3
CD Projekt Red's upcoming release The Witcher 4 is facing high expectations, and the studio acknowledges the pressure of following up one of the most critically acclaimed RPGs of all time. In a recent interview with GamesRadar+, narrative director Philipp Weber admitted that the development team is aware of online discussions questioning how the next game will match the success of The Witcher 3. Weber responded to this by saying, 'I'm like 'yeah, how are we going to do that?'' He added that while expectations are high, the team remains committed to the creative principles that guided the previous title. 'The way we want to do justice to the legacy of The Witcher 3 is to take the philosophy we had during The Witcher 3 – how to make a game, how to really care about these things, how to tell stories – and keep that philosophy.' He also explained that the goal isn't to replicate the previous game, but to create a new experience that honours its foundation. 'This is supposed to feel like a true sequel, not just redoing what we did before,' Weber noted. Although the game is still in early development, it has been confirmed that The Witcher 4 is set in Kovir and will use Unreal Engine 5. CD Projekt Red has not yet announced a release date.
Daily Mirror
26-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
CD Projekt Red on 10 years of the Witcher 3 and how it will inform Ciri's upcoming sequel adventure
Following the most recent demonstration of The Witcher 4 at this year's State of Unreal presentation, we discuss the past, present, and future of the series with CD Projekt Red. We sit down with CD Projekt Red's Senior VP of Technology, Charles Tremblay, to talk about all things past, present, and future on The Witcher 3's 10th anniversary. For many players there exists two moments in history: a time before the release of The Witcher 3 and the time after. A lot may have changed in the industry since 2015, but something that's remained a constant is how revered CD Projekt Red 's open-world rendition of the celebrated Polish book series remains. 2025 marks a decade since its initial release on PS4, Xbox One, and PC, and in that time it'd be fair to say that a lot of other open-world games have been playing catch up. Sure, we had The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim beforehand, but The Witcher 3 more than earns its place alongside Bethesda 's game as a true classic of the fantasy RPG genre. Knowing this makes it easy to understand why CD Projekt Red's next game, The Witcher 4, is so highly anticipated. The sequel is still without its release date, but we know that it will include a new region to explore – Kovir – alongside a totally new protagonist to do it with in Ciri. To find out more about how much CD Projekt Red as a studio has evolved since the Witcher 3's release, the switch to Unreal Engine 5, and how these changes may inform Ciri's adventure, we flew to the studio's HQ in Poland and spoke to Senior VP of Technology Charles Tremblay. How has CD Projekt Red's approach to making games changed since The Witcher 3 first released? I think The Witcher 3 was quite a sweet spot in terms of team size, mostly because we were quite a smaller team when I joined. We were 150-ish people, and we grew to 200 to 250 to make the whole [game]. The communication was fine. I could just walk to anyone at a walking distance. Right now, if I want to walk to the Witcher 4 team, I have to walk a few kilometres to the other building. The art team [and] the programming team were much more aligned also. We still had problems, but we were able to make the game as we used to do in the industry for decades. When we scaled up to Cyberpunk 2077, we almost doubled the team. Now it's getting a bit scarier because the more people you have, the more the communication problems start to arise where there's expectation on one side and reality on the other. Before we very quickly could align. Now, there's so many people in the loop. We tried to learn how to adapt, but it was extremely challenging and we did fail in quite a few ways. Some expectations from art were not aligned with engineering, especially [with] what we could do with the hardware we had at the time. But the ambition was there. If we had a small team, it would have probably been simpler and we didn't think too much about this problem until it was too late. Fast forward [to] where we are now. Especially after the launch of Cyberpunk, we had some self-introspection about, 'okay, we do not see a way we can scale down back to 150 people because of the reality of the ambition, plus what people expect from our product'. We needed to change the way we approach game development a little bit. We don't think it's sustainable to grow to thousands of people to make a game. We want to keep around the ballpark of Cyberpunk's scale, if not less. We try to now have a more multidisciplinary team working together. I cannot say too much about Witcher 4, but I think that we are getting to a point where we get some good results. But still, we are learning and evolving how to make the game better and faster, and better for the players. Is it hard to switch back to making and designing a fantasy world versus something more modern like Night City? Oh, on the technology side, it's completely different. One is a sprawling city with verticality. It was not a city like New York; it's much more organic. A very disgusting world [with] lots of trash and lots of details that needed to be handled. You have vehicles, which we don't necessarily have in The Witcher universe. Bigger crowd, different behaviours, encounters… graffiti everywhere. When we go back to The Witcher, though, it is a much more dynamic world, mostly because of the forest. The forest is a completely different challenge, technically, to make it as good as possible. You can imagine we will definitely have some city in some form going forward, like Novigrad that we had in The Witcher 3, so they're still there in some form. But I think one of the biggest issues we have right now is how to design forest and how to make everything move all the time. How to [give] it [a] feeling that it's alive. How do we improve from the Witcher 3 forest? How do make monsters, wildlife and everything so it fits into this universe's completely different design? Also, the agenda is quite different. The Witcher, of course, Ciri or Geralt, they are full-fledged characters. They have their own personality. There are things that they will not do. While when you go [back] to Cyberpunk, V is a more a mercenary. She has more freedom about how she wants to tackle the world, in an evil or good way. It's very difficult to see Geralt starting to go GTA style, so there's a different constraint. The most recent glimpse of Witcher 4 we saw from the State of Unreal presentation. Were you happy to people's reaction to that gameplay slice? Oh definitely, I think that even our friends from PR were not expecting that it would be as well received, because it's very difficult to explain a tech demo, right? How do we discuss this with you guys? I think it turned out very well. There was a lot of things that we needed to prove within [the] technology and we aligned into what we showcased. And with Epic, it was much easier to now have a result on the screen. We want to go at 60fps on PS5. Now the reception, when we were in Orlando and we were doing the rehearsal, I had shivers. I had complete shivers the first time I saw it from the beginning to end, and I was like, 'this is just fantastic'. Of course, we saw it on the little screen and were iterating on it, but when we saw on the big screen we were like, 'okay, this is going to be great'. And I think when we did the first official rehearsal everybody from Epic and our side were very impressed about the result. Speaking of Epic, how are you finding the process of developing Witcher 4 in Unreal Engine 5 as opposed to the Red Engine from before? We are a very ambitious company and now, since we work together [with Epic] on what it means to make the next generation of open-world, we need to align differently. That's why we did this. The two technologies are completely different, the way they handle a few things. Definitely some things would have been way easier on RED Engine and somethings are way easier on Unreal. Now we just try to take all the good things we have on Unreal and all the things we add with Unreal Engine, and try to now have some kind of a beautiful baby, just to be sure that we can scale up to the hardware. We don't want to go back and to have a less quality product. For us, it's not very acceptable to step back, right? The ambition is still there. We want to push forward always. This was very important for us, and I think this is why with Epic, we managed to have very good collaboration. I think the fact that they managed to work with us to make this open world and deliver the technology that is required to make it at performance [where] everybody will benefit, not just us. Finally, with it being The Witcher 3's 10th anniversary, do you have a favourite quest? I think the most interesting one is probably when you reunite with the witchers in Kaer Morhen. All those characters have been following you around since starting your journey with Geralt. It was really great to continue building into those great characters. All the quests with those characters were great. I'm a sucker for a nostalgic moment, especially when you're an IP fan or a game fan and you have all those moments that you know those characters, you've been working with them, or having discussions with them in previous games. There is, of course, all the quests that go back to The Witcher 2, Letho, which if you didn't kill him, spoilers, I think it's great to have him back and having this character back, and the dialogue was just fantastic.
Metro
25-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
The Witcher dev CD Projekt's new game revealed in oddly descriptive job listing
Details have emerged about the new, original IP from the makers of The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077, as CD Projekt juggles multiple projects. Everyone's attention might be on The Witcher 4 right now, but developer CD Projekt has several games currently in development. Along with the fantasy role-player, which is expected to launch in 2027, the studio is cooking up a sequel to Cyberpunk 2077 and another game set in The Witcher universe codenamed Project Sirius. A remake of The Witcher 1 is also in development, albeit at an external studio. The most mysterious project in the pipeline is Project Hadar, which we know nothing about except that it's an original IP. However, thanks to a new job listing, we now have some basic details on what to expect. As spotted on Reddit, the job listing is for a Senior Gameplay Designer at CD Projekt's main studio in Warsaw, Poland. The job description mentions it is for Project Hadar specifically, which is described as being in 'its early days'. 'This is an exciting opportunity to join a team that's building a universe from the ground up where your ideas, experience, and creativity can directly shape the project's vision, identity, and direction,' the description reads. While there aren't many concrete details, the post states Project Hadar will be built in Unreal Engine 5. Elsewhere, it implies the game is an action role-player with an emphasis on melee combat. Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. Under the 'qualifications' segment for the role, it reads: 'At least 5+ years of professional experience in a similar role, preferably in RPG/action titles with melee-orientated combat.' More Trending While the genre isn't surprising, considering action role-players are CD Projekt's bread and butter, the focus on melee combat suggests it might be closer to The Witcher than Cyberpunk 2077. The latter had melee combat but it was largely secondary to the gunplay and hacking. The big question for Project Hadar is the game's setting, considering the studio has already covered fantasy and sci-fi in a big way. If it does lean on melee combat, it could potentially pre-date guns, so perhaps a historical game akin to Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2? Melee combat is usually the weakest element in CD Projekt's games so this could be a purposeful attempt to address that head-on. The description brings to mind something like God Of War but whether that's specifically what they're aiming for is impossible to tell at the moment. Whatever it is, it's likely Project Hadar will be many years away yet. After The Witcher 4, the studio's next game will be Cyberpunk 2, which might not be out until 2030, so Project Hadar could be a decade away depending on how things shake out. Email gamecentral@ leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader's Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. MORE: Xbox games for Switch 2 'expected' soon ahead of rumoured Nintendo Direct MORE: Mario and Peach are just 'good friends' says Nintendo despite kissing for decades MORE: Star Wars Outlaws 2 cancelled by Ubisoft claims insider
Metro
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
The Witcher 4 designed for PS5 and not PC after 'so many problems' scaling down
CD Projekt has discussed its technical ambitions for The Witcher 4, which marks a big change in strategy for the studio. The history of CD Projekt is rooted in the PC market, stemming back to the original The Witcher in 2007 and their origins as a CD-ROM importer, but development of The Witcher 4 will see the studio make a shift in priorities. The majority of CD Projekt's games have been built for PC first, with console versions scaled down from this baseline to accommodate their technical limitations. However, this method has caused some issues in the past, with console versions of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Cyberpunk 2077 riddled with problems at launch – especially the latter. An Unreal Engine 5 demo for The Witcher 4 earlier this month indicated a possible sea change at the studio, showing the upcoming sequel running on a standard PlayStation 5 at 60fps. Now, CD Projekt has confirmed Sony's console is the priority for The Witcher 4. When asked by Digital Foundry, about the reasons why it chose to show the Unreal Engine 5 demo on PlayStation 5, Charles Tremblay, vice president of technology at CD Projekt, said: 'As you said, we always do PC and we push [the technology] and try to scale down. But then we had so many problems in the past that we tried to see, ok this time around we really want to be more console-first development.' After noting the challenge of targeting 60fps on PlayStation 5 with a game like The Witcher 4, he added: 'Where we go from there is hard to say, but right now we really wanted to focus on what does it mean to make this ambition on a console, and we have all our other projects at 60fps and we really wanted to aim for 60fps once again.' While it remains to be seen what this means for the PC version, Tremblay did reassure PC players that it still wants to offer the 'best experience' for those on the platform. Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. When asked how the studio would potentially scale up The Witcher 4 beyond PlayStation 5, Tremblay said: 'I don't want to go too much in details and again, not to overpromise, but in the past something that's super important for the group is that if people pay good money for their hardware, then we want them to have what the game can provide for that. Not like a simplified experience. So this is something we'll definitely explore. 'The company started as a PC company and we definitely will want to have the best experience for the PC gamer for sure, but it's too early to say what it will mean for The Witcher 4.' According to Tremblay, the bigger hurdle is scaling down from the PlayStation 5 version, most notably for the Xbox Series S. More Trending 'This is something that is next on our radar for sure,' Tremblay replied, when asked about the Xbox Series S version. 'I will say that 60fps will definitely be extremely challenging on [Xbox] Series S. Let's just say this is something that we need to figure out.' As per Microsoft rules, developers have to ensure their games can run on both the Xbox Series X and the Xbox Series S, with no difference in features. This has caused problems in the past, with Baldur's Gate 3 being delayed on Xbox Series X/S due to issues related to the lower-powered console. The Witcher 4 doesn't have a release date yet but it is expected to launch in 2027, with a sequel to Cyberpunk 2077 set to follow. That's around the time that the PlayStation 6 has been rumoured for release, but unsurprisingly Tremblay made no mention of that. Email gamecentral@ leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader's Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. MORE: Nintendo Switch 2 sales numbers smash records in the US and worldwide MORE: Red Dead Redemption 2 actor teases news this week as fans hope for Switch 2 port MORE: Games Inbox: Would Xbox ever shut down Game Pass?
Metro
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
The Witcher 3 rumour says new DLC is on the way but it's not a full expansion
After celebrating its 10th anniversary, The Witcher 3 is rumoured to be getting another update besides mod support. Given it's hard at work on both The Witcher 4 and the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel, you wouldn't think CD Projekt would have time to revisit The Witcher 3, beyond the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S update in 2022. And yet the game is set to receive full mod support later this year and now a fresh rumour has begun circulating, claiming that the now 10-year-old game is receiving a new expansion too. This is supposedly being made, not by CD Projekt Red, but by Fool's Theory, a separate Polish studio CD Projekt enlisted to helm a full remake of the first Witcher game (which is currently MIA). The rumour comes from a pair of popular Polish podcasters called Rock & Borys. At least we assume they're popular, given their YouTube channel boasts 1.45 million subscribers. According to them (per a translation by MP1st) the DLC will be story related and is expected to arrive after The Witcher 3's mod support. No exact date has been given yet for when that'll happen, but it's supposed to be happening later this year. Depending on the timing, this means any new Witcher 3 DLC may not be out until 2026. Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. However, despite what some have assumed, this doesn't sound like it will be a full expansion like the Hearts Of Stone and Blood And Wine and it's unclear if it will be a free update or something you'll need to spend money on. While any such rumour should be taken with a grain of salt, some fans on Reddit claim Rock & Borys have contacts within CD Projekt and thus can be considered reliable with their claims. It would also make some sense, since The Witcher 3 did celebrate is 10th anniversary this past May, where CD Projekt revealed the game had sold over 60 million copies. With mod support sure to draw back fans, that'll be an opportune time to drop more content for them to sink their teeth into, especially since both The Witcher 4 and The Witcher 1 remake lack any firm release date. More Trending CD Projekt's latest financial report did insinuate The Witcher 4 could launch as early as 2027, but the studio couldn't promise it wouldn't need to push the game back. A tech demo for The Witcher 4 was also shown recently, giving fans a first glimpse at how it'll run using Epic Games' Unreal Engine 5. It was an impressive showing, especially since it was said to be running on a base PlayStation 5 and not a PS5 Pro. However, CD Projekt soon tried to downplay expectations, issuing a statement stressing that the demo is not meant to be indicative of the final product and it could look quite differently. 'It's important to keep in mind that this tech demo isn't meant to represent The Witcher 4 – it's a showcase of the tools we're developing together with Epic Games. That means specific visuals like character models and environments may be different to The Witcher 4,' said a studio representative. Email gamecentral@ leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader's Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. MORE: The Witcher 4 will be 'bigger' and 'better' than The Witcher 3 says CD Projekt MORE: The Witcher 4 'won't focus on Geralt' but he will be involved confirms voice actor MORE: Cyberpunk 2077 sequel will feature at least two cities says franchise creator
