Everything you need to know about The Witcher 4
A new Witcher picks up the swords.
It’s been over a decade since the release of The Witcher 3, and its sequel is still in the works. While much about The Witcher 4 is still mysterious, in the last couple of years it’s moved from a total unknown to a game with enough tantalizing details to get excited about.
The Witcher 3 wrapped up the story of Geralt, white-haired hero of the games, novels, and TV series, making room for an entirely new tale starting with the next game. Here’s everything we know so far about The Witcher 4, the sequel to one of the best open-world RPGs of all time.
Geralt won’t be returning as the hero of The Witcher 4.
When is The Witcher 4 release window?
The Witcher 3 took CDPR more than three-and-a-half years and $81 million to develop. Despite the long wait between games, CDPR only announced in March 2022 that The Witcher 4 was officially in development, as it was busy developing The Witcher 3 DLC and Cyberpunk 2077 in the meantime.
The Witcher 4 puts Ciri in the lead role.
While CDPR still hasn’t announced a release window for the game, the developer did reveal during a 2024 investor call that it won’t be out until 2027 at the earliest.
What is The Witcher 4 story?
One of the first details revealed publicly about The Witcher 4 is that Geralt won’t be the protagaonist. CDPR co-founder Marcin Iwinski said the company doesn’t intend to expand on Geralt’s story any further in a 2017 investor call.
“The Witcher was designed as a trilogy, and a trilogy cannot have a fourth part, can it?” he said. “We like this world a lot. We invested 15 years of our lives in it, and a lot of money. We’ll think about it at some point.”
While there was some speculation at the time that The Witcher 4 could be a prequel or explore new characters entirely, it will instead star a familiar face. Ciri, whose disappearance forms the backbone of The Witcher 3, will instead take up the mantle, presumably continuing from one of that game’s endings which sees her training as a Witcher herself.
A cinematic trailer for The Witcher 4 shows Ciri going up against monsters and men alike.
Beyond that, we still don’t know what the game’s story will entail. It will take place at the beginning of Ciri’s journey as a Witcher, a far cry from the experienced and jaded Geralt. A story trailer released in 2024 shows Ciri attempting to rescue a woman being sacrificed to appease a monster by her village, putting Ciri at odds with human and monster foes alike.
CDPR has also revealed that one quest in The Witcher 3, involving a supernatural plague and a corrupt church, was designed to help get new developers up to speed before the sequel. If the trailer and quest are any indication, Ciri will likely end up just as embroiled in human political struggles as mosnter slaying, just like Geralt did.
Will there be any more returning characters in The Witcher 4?
The Witcher 3 most likely won’t be the last time fans see Geralt. Executive producer John Mamais told Polygon the magic-wielding swordsman would probably return in future installments of the franchise.
“We might even include Geralt in later games potentially,” he said. “We just need to talk about it and figure out what we’re going to do next.”
Doug Cockle, Geralt’s voice actor also confirmed that he appears in the game in some form in a 2024 interview. We’ll have to wait to find out more specifics about the sequel to determine whether Geralt will appear as a side character or just for a brief cameo.
Geratlt’s voice actor confirms that he does have a part in the sequel.
What are The Witcher 4 platforms?
It’s extremely likely that The Witcher 4 will arrive on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S simultaneously. Given that it won’t land until 2027 at the earliest, that list could also expand to include any new platforms available when it comes out. The Switch 2 remains an open question for the game. While its hardware is considerably more powerful than the original Switch, it’s still not clear how well it could run The Witcher 4. A Nintendo Switch version of The Witcher 3 didn’t launch until 2019 and it did suffer somewhat from the console’s limitations.
What’s different about The Witcher 4’s development?
The Witcher 4 marks the first time CDPR has moved away from its own proprietary engine to develop in Unreal Engine 5. According to the studio, the move comes as a result of its REDEngine struggling with developing multiple games at once and working with multiplayer titles. While there’s nothing to suggest that The Witcher 4 will include multiplayer, CDPR currently has more than one Witcher game in development, one of which is multiplayer.
CDPR showed off its new engine’s capabilities in a tech demo for The Witcher 4.
A tech demo for The Witcher 4 showed off what CDPR is using Unreal Engine for, though it’s best seen as an aspirational demo rather than actual gameplay. The engine includes support for large, aniamted crowds in cities, more realistic NPCs, and more impressive foliage, which is pretty crucial given that of those are environments a Witcher might find herself in quite often.
The Witcher 4 is also being developed with consoles in mind specifically. According to CDPR, making a game that runs well on consoles and scaling up the tech for the PC version is much easier than starting with PC and having to cut capabilities to work on a console. CDPR has called out Xbox Series S as a point of concern, given its lower-spec hardware.
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