The Witcher 4 To Grip Player’s Attention With Thrilling New Choices and Consequences

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was released in May 2015, and boy, did it make an impact. Setting Geralt of Rivia on a quest to find his adopted daughter, Ciri, the game provided players with epic monster encounters, thought-provoking dialogue options with a wide range of cast members, and an insanely large world to explore.  It ended up scoring a staggering 92% on Metacritic and is still loved and played a full decade later, so the pressure is on CD Projekt Red to really deliver with The Witcher 4.

In an interview with IGN, developers recently expounded on what they’re aiming to achieve with The Witcher 4, which features Ciri as the protagonist this time around. They elaborated on various bespoke systems that need to be made to account for the vast scope of the game’s adventures, the play-testing that goes in to each and every storyline to account for as many variable as they can, and the choice-based storytelling that let has become a signature of both the Witcher franchise and Cyberpunk 2077.

Making Players Think

Whatever the choice is, and whatever the consequence is, we want players to feel rewarded, even if the emotion in the end is sadness.

The immersive feel of a game is often impacted by the notion of continuity, and The Witcher’s development team seems to understand that intrinsically. With The Witcher 4, they have incorporated a method of delaying consequences so the world feels more authentic and the player’s choices carry that little extra weight.

This philosophy is shown in the Witcher 4 trailer, which was showcased at the Game Awards in 2024. The trailer shows Ciri telling a human sacrifice to run back to her village while she takes on the monster lurking in the cave system by said village. The monster is defeated, and all seems well…until Ciri makes it back to that village to find the girl murdered because she was not sacrificed as she was supposed to be.

These moral conundrums will present themselves more and more as the game continues, and will not have arbitrary consequences either. Despite the tangled complexities, CD Projekt Red is unafraid of a far-reaching issue, so a poor decision made early game could very well result in the death of an important politician later down the line, or could cause terrible drama with regards to romantic encounters.

A Story About the Player

Despite this focus on choices and consequences, Pawel Sasko, the associate Game Director, did point out that The Witcher 4 is not going to rely on the idea of misinformation. ‘All the sides are presented to you beforehand,’ he explains. ‘You had the opportunity to actually assimilate all the information.’ This idea does fit in with wanting the player to be rewarded for their choices. It can be disappointing to make a heavy-stakes choice and then find out later that you missed something integral that would have drastically changed your mind, discouraging, even, to the point of dropping the game.

This was fine-tuned using Cyberpunk 2077, in which the conclusion for several choices felt unsatisfying, according to the Witcher developers, because information was easily missed, and the implications of the choices presented were far too subtle.

The Witcher 4 is very aware of this and makes sure to focus players in so they feel that whatever they’re doing, they’re directing their story through choices rooted in their own morality. Traditionally, CD Projekt Red has pulled off this element of gameplay design very well. Evidence of this can be seen in Witcher 3’s Bloody Baron branching storylines and in Cyberpunk 2077 with the choice to help either Songbird or Reed, so we really are expecting a lot from The Witcher 4. ‘We haven’t gotten more afraid over the years of people missing our content,’ Miles Tost, Lead Game Designer, explains to IGN. ‘But it’s also the amount of resources you commit to basically making two different stories. ‘

Tost won’t have to worry too much about people missing content. The gaming community has a penchant for being rather hyper-focussed on achieving multiple endings, so it is a guarantee that when The Witcher 4 drops, there will be forums dedicated to analysing the repercussions of certain decisions, where to find pathways that lead to particularly interesting outcomes, and YouTube videos launching in waves of delight as players explore themselves through the eyes of Ciri and the the Witcher’s world.

What is Ciri Fighting?

The trailer emphasises the significance of Ciri’s choice with the whispers that overlay the altercation between her and the monster she finds in the cave after telling the human sacrifice to run home. But what exactly is it that Ciri is fighting, and are those whispers part of its particular lore? The monster tells Ciri, ‘Fate cannot be changed. You cannot change anything, which is a direct philosophical contrast to the idea of choice that the game is presenting.

These words become particularly chilling when you know that the creature is a Bauk, a six-armed, bipedal creature that can perfectly mimic the voices of other people. This begs the question of who has said those words to that creature, and what significance do they really have for Ciri and the player, in particular?

Though there is no specific release date for The Witcher 4 as of yet, speculation is that it could be ready sometime in 2027. For now, we will watch this space for any updates like Ciri with her night vision potion, ready to pick apart the details and figure out the answers as soon as they’re presented.