Following the recent Golden Joystick Awards, CD Projekt RED’s Małgorzata Mitręga, who also serves as the production director on The Witcher 4, went up on stage to celebrate the upcoming title winning the “Most Wanted Game” award. As caught by GamesRadar, Mitręga noted that the entire studio feels a “great responsibility” to ensure that The Witcher 4 ends up being a high-quality release worthy of this award.
“This is a huge, huge honor for us, but it’s also a great responsibility. We all know it. We are working hard, giving heart and soul there, all the skills we have, passion we have, and moments like that are such a f***ing boost for us, for the stamina, to [keep] it going, to deliver [for] you when the time is right.”
The studio has quietly continued its work on the RPG without having revealed too many details aside from its initial announcement trailer and an Unreal Engine showcase trailer. However, members of the studio have popped up every now and then to provide a few morsels of information. For example, CD Projekt RED’s joint CEO Adam Badowski said in September that there is an “immense focus” on the core narrative of The Witcher 4.
This focus involves the developers spending quite a bit of time to ensure that players will get to make plenty of narrative choices throughout their time with the RPG. These choices, he said, will even leave a “lasting impression on players”, which indicates that the studio has something special planned for when it comes time for players to face the consequences of their choices.
On the subject of the studio deciding to move over from its in-house RED Engine to Unreal Engine 5, co-CEO Michał Nowakowski has said that the team wanted to spend less time tinkering with the engine itself and more time building the game. He mentioned that Unreal Engine 5 first came to the company’s attention with The Matrix Awakens – a tech demo that was released all the way back in 2021 to showcase the engine’s capabilities.
“It was more the moment we got an early scoop of the Matrix demo that Epic made, and we then asked ourselves: is UE5 ready to ship a game like we make… the answer is no, not at the moment, not at the entry level, but if we form a relationship with Unreal and if we work on certain things which are specifically required to make games of the size and scope… it could actually work.”
“Our goal was not really to create technology but to tell stories. But then we realized that in order to tell the stories the way we want to tell them, we do need to have the technology. [By using Unreal Engine 5] we’re not going to be responsible for creating the technology from scratch but rather creating for that technology little things that actually make a big difference.”
The Witcher 4 doesn’t yet have a release date. Among the details that have been confirmed about the title is the fact that Ciri is replacing Geralt as the main protagonist.
