The Witcher IV
About this game
I want to be upfront about something before I say anything else: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is my favourite game. Not just my favourite RPG, not just my favourite open world - my favourite game, full stop. I have over a thousand hours in it. I've replayed it from start to finish at least ten times, every time with the side quests, every time reading every bestiary entry and piece of lore, every time getting irrationally invested in whether Cerys or Hjalmar becomes Queen of Skellige. The Bloody Baron quest line still hits me the same way it did the first time I played it. That's not nostalgia. That's a genuinely extraordinary piece of writing that holds up under infinite replays. So when CD Projekt Red finally revealed The Witcher IV at The Game Awards in December 2024, my reaction wasn't pure excitement. It was complicated. It still is. The reveal was stunning. A six-minute cinematic rendered in Unreal Engine 5, and every second of it looked like exactly the world I know. An isolated village called Stromford, terrorised for generations by a monster called the Bauk - a creature drawn from Serbian folklore that feeds on fear, that senses its prey's deepest traumas and exploits them. A young woman named Mioni is chosen for ritual sacrifice. A hooded figure disrupts the procession. And then Ciri - older, scarred, feline-eyed, fully mutated through the Trial of the Grasses she apparently completed between games - steps forward to take the contract and fight the thing herself. She drinks a Witcher potion. She draws a silver sword. She fights. She wins. She returns to find the villagers have killed Mioni anyway out of fear and superstition, despite everything Ciri did to protect her. That final beat is the purest distillation of what made The Witcher 3's writing so powerful: humans are as monstrous as the beasts, the moral landscape is always grey, and doing the right thing doesn't guarantee the right outcome. If The Witcher IV maintains that register throughout, we're going to be fine. The canonical setup is that CDPR has apparently confirmed one of The Witcher 3's endings as the definitive one - specifically an ending in which Ciri survives and becomes a Witcher. The game takes place roughly ten years after the events of Wild Hunt, with Ciri now walking the Path independently, a fully trained Witcher navigating a world where old dark forces are rising again and the consequences of her past are still following her. The story begins in the kingdom of Kovir - a new region not previously explored in the games, glimpsed in both the June 2025 tech demo and the second cinematic trailer, featuring a mountainous, coastal landscape that looks visually distinct from the Northern Kingdoms and looks absolutely extraordinary running on UE5 with Lumen lighting and Nanite foliage. The tech demo, running on a base PS5 at 60 frames per second with ray tracing, was the first indication that CDPR has learned from the technical disasters of Cyberpunk 2077's launch - they appear to be building this on a foundation that actually runs properly rather than promising something undeliverable. Here's where my complicated feelings come in. Geralt was special. The way he moved, the weight of him, the specific rhythm of his combat between Quen signs and rolling and heavy sword strikes - there was a sense of earned authority in playing as him. The dominance, the mystery, the feeling of being the most dangerous thing in the room even when the world was stacked against you. A thousand hours of that specific texture is a very specific thing to step away from. Ciri is a fundamentally different kind of character. In The Witcher 3 she felt like raw, barely-contained power - blink teleportation, Elder Blood, capable of things Geralt simply wasn't. In theory, playing as her should feel even more empowering. The trailer shows her wielding a silver sword alongside a luminous magical chain, casting sign-equivalent spells by drawing energy from the environment, tracking monsters with Witcher senses. The combat shown in trailers suggests something faster and more acrobatic than Geralt's style - she's always been described as built for speed and blink-like traversal. Whether that translates into the same feeling of dark, grounded dominance that made Geralt's combat so satisfying is genuinely the question I can't answer from cinematics alone. What I do trust is CDPR's ability to write her. Ciri is one of the most fully realised characters in the franchise - her arc across the books, the backstory, the weight she carries as the Child of the Elder Blood who can reshape the world. The fact that the reveal trailer immediately demonstrated the series' core moral philosophy through her specific experience - saving someone only to watch human cruelty undo everything - suggests the writing team understands her voice and the story they want to tell with her. The second cinematic trailer, shown at Unreal Fest 2025, expanded the monster variety significantly. The Bauk established one mode - claustrophobic woodland horror, strategic and patient. The manticore in the second trailer is the exact opposite: aerial, explosive, an apex predator that dominates vertical space and presumably demands aggressive, momentum-based combat. Two radically different threat types within the first two trailers suggests the monster design is going to demand the same kind of adaptive preparation that made Witcher 3's contract system so consistently engaging. As for the timeline: CDPR confirmed in multiple investor calls that The Witcher IV won't arrive before 2027 at the earliest, with 2028 now considered more likely by most informed observers. Full-scale production only began at the end of 2024. The whole trilogy - Witcher 4, 5, and 6 - is planned within a six-year span, which CDPR believes is achievable now that the UE5 foundation can be shared across entries. There's also reportedly a new Witcher 3 expansion in development as a narrative bridge, rumoured for May 2026 to mark the game's anniversary, and a fresh look at Witcher IV was confirmed at Unreal Fest in Chicago running June 16-18 this year. I'm going to play it the moment it launches. Of course I am. I just hope it gives me the same feeling of being alone at night in a world that is beautiful and dark and completely indifferent to your survival, and making your way through it anyway. That's what The Witcher 3 always was. And no other game has managed to replicate it since.
