CD Projekt Red formally announces THE WITCHER IV

CD Projekt Red has formally confirmed the existence of The Witcher IV with a CG trailer at the Games Awards. They had acknowledged that the game existed previously, but this is the first time they've confirmed that it would be called The Witcher IV (rather than The Witcher Colon Subtitle Something) and it will focus on the character of Ciri.

The game follows The Witcher (2007), The Witcher II: Assassin of Kings (2011) and The Witcher III: Wild Hunt (2015) and sees a change of protagonist. The first three games, which acted as an unofficial sequel to the nine-volume book series by Andrzej Sapkowski, saw you playing Geralt, the titular Witcher, as he grappled with various threats to the Northern Kingdoms. In The Witcher III he earned a pleasant retirement by saving Ciri, a young girl with impressive powers, who was destined to save the world. The game also saw you playing Ciri at several key points in the narrative. The game ended with Ciri in various possible states, including becoming the Empress of Nilfgaard, dying, or entering Witcher training.

The Witcher IV suggest that, whichever ending you chose, by several years later Ciri has circled back around to becoming a Witcher in her own right, wielding magical powers of the Cat School. Some fans had speculated that the game might allow you to create your own Witcher protagonist, in the vein of CDPR's other big video game adaptation, Cyberpunk 2077 (2020), but CDPR seemed to prefer to stick to the idea of using a pre-existing, firmly-established character.

The game entered development after the release of Cyberpunk 2077, although early work was slowed by the urgent need to patch and fix that game after its rough launch window. As a result, it's hard to know how far along The Witcher IV is; CDPR only recently confirmed that the game was entering full-time development, and Cyberpunk 2077's first trailer preceded the release of the game by a startling eight years. CDPR hope to speed The Witcher IV's development by using the more widely-used Unreal 5 Engine to speed onboarding of new staff. I'd be impressed to see this game released much this side of 2028 though.

As well as The Witcher IV, itself projected as the start of a new trilogy, CDPR are working on a sequel to Cyberpunk 2077, a game in a totally new IP and a remake of the original Witcher game from 2007.