The Witcher 3 was and is one of the best games ever made. But it’s ten years old now, and with The Witcher 4 in the works, CD Projekt Red (CDPR) has a lot of work cut out. The industry has changed in the last decade, new technologies have come out, and with so many good games in the last few years, the bar is higher than ever.
But the developers are CD Projekt Red aren’t taking this as a challenge, they’re seeing what makes these recent hit games good, and using that knowledge to improve the upcoming game. But which games have inspired the studio the most? The answer is relatively simple if you think about it.
CDPR was motivated by two of the best games in recent history
During a recent interview with PC Gamer, CD Projekt Red co-CEO Adam Badowski spoke about how the industry has changed since The Witcher 3 came out in 2015. He recognizes that while storytelling is still a big part of CDPR’s identity, The Witcher 4 will need to innovate on the gameplay side of things.
Badowski then brings up titles like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 as good examples of inspiration for the next Witcher game. He praised the game’s realism and humor, but more importantly, its world design and the freedom that it gives to us, the player. “These are our next steps for sure,” Badowski says, so there’s some clear inspiration there. Which is good, because we loved KCD2.
The Kingdom Come kind of simulation, it’s great… There’s so many options, you can change the world, it’s super great. And we would like to keep that, we’d like to follow this trend as well.
The studio also showed admiration for Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3. But CDPR’s other co-CEO, Michał Nowakowski, was quick to say one thing. “We definitely are not going to make a game like Larian did,” he said. So we can rest assured that the next Witcher game won’t be turn-based or have D&D-style mechanics.
It’s kind of a similar challenge to what we had in The Witcher 3… but we would like to build very fleshy, very well-motivated characters.
Still, there is inspiration to be found in how Larian made a world that truly felt alive. CDPR isn’t trying to copy either of these games, the studio is looking at their uniqueness and trying to bring it to The Witcher 4 in a new way.
So, how exactly is The Witcher 4 going to be different?
We’ve already seen what could possibly be the result of this new vision. The studio recently featured in the State of Unreal event and gave us a new tech demo of The Witcher 4. It looked awesome, but it was mostly focused on the technology in the game and the graphics. But beneath it, we do get an idea of the world that we will soon get to experience.
The excitement for The Witcher 4 is in full supply, but so is the skepticism. CD Project Red is one of the biggest studios in gaming; we all know that much. The Witcher 3 is one of the best games the industry has seen, and it’s still popular today. But so is Cyberpunk 2077, and for completely different reasons.
Cyberpunk 2077 may be one of the best games out there on the market right now, and it’s even getting another DLC soon. But do you remember the game’s launch? It was so bad at launch that the entire situation became the biggest and clearest lesson to the industry on how not to launch a game.
You’d think that means CDPR would do everything to not mess up The Witcher 4‘s launch. But until the game really comes out, we can’t help but worry.
This post belongs to FandomWire and first appeared on FandomWire
