CD Projekt Red has revealed the next game in The Witcher series.
CD Projekt Red has revealed the next release in The Witcher series — The Witcher 4 — during The Game Awards 2024. As expected, it appears to star Ciri as the new Witcher, the character who many assumed would take over as the protagonist after Geralt. The new Witcher release is set to be the first major Witcher release since The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which was released back in 2015. Meanwhile, it will be the first major release from the Polish studio full stop since 2020’s Cyberpunk 2077.
The Witcher — as a video game series — debuted back in 2007 with the release of The Witcher. At this time, the series was a niche release and far from widely known. In 2011 though, it was followed up with the release of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, which grew the series in popularity, but failed to introduce it to the mainstream market. Then in 2015, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt released, and it broke through to the mainstream achieving both immense critical success and commercial success. To this end, it is widely considered one of the best games of all time. It was then bolstered with two expansions: Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine.
Beyond the three mainline installments, there have been numerous spin-offs: 2014’s The Witcher Adventure Game, 2015’s The Witcher Battle Arena, 2018’s Gwent: The Witcher Card Game, 2018’s Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales, 2021’s The Witcher: Monster Slayer, and 2022’s Roach Race.
Beyond The Witcher series, CD Projekt Red has since made a name for itself with the release of Cyberpunk 2077 in 2020 and its Phantom Liberty expansion in 2023.
Both Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher have grown with multimedia adaptations. The most prominent examples of this is 2022’s anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and Netflix’s ongoing The Witcher TV series.
Nonetheless, we got an exciting look at the next chapter of The Witcher series tonight. We see Ciri, now a fully-fledged witcher, save a woman being sacrificed by her village to an arachnid creature. After a lengthy fight, Ciri triumphs over the beast. Unfortunately for our new protagonist, the villagers still sacrifice the woman.
Unlike the studio’s previous games, The Witcher 4 is being developed using Unreal Engine 5, and not CDPR’s proprietary REDengine. The Witcher 4 is intended to be the first of a trilogy of games, mirroring the path of the original three games.
There’s already a considerable amount of hype surrounding The Witcher 4 (perhaps too much?), with lead engine programmer Charles Tremblay promising the title would be “better, bigger and greater” than anything that CD Projekt Red has released so far. Considering the roaring success of The Witcher 3 and the recent resurgence of Cyberpunk 2077, this is a bold statement to make.
Although Cyberpunk 2077 has been enjoying the spotlight recently, there’s no doubt that the success of The Witcher 3 is responsible for growing CD Projekt Red into the behemoth multi-studio outfit it has grown into. Returning to the series that catapulted CD Projekt into the heights of triple-A development is sure to be a tantalising prospect for the studio.
Geoff Keighley teased The Witcher 4 would be coming “beyond 2025,” suggesting we’re still a few years from release.
