Factually and personally, The Witcher 3 is an all-time video game. It’s the perfect RPG. The Witcher 4 has the considerable pressure of trying to amount to to live up to its predecessor. The Witcher 4 dev Philipp Weber has opened up on the difficult nature of the process.
The Witcher 3 has sold over 60 million copies worldwide and is lauded as one of the best RPGs ever. CD Projekt Red’s emotional journey features some of the deepest main and side quests I’ve ever seen in a game, an all-star cast of characters you can’t help but attach yourself to, an enchanting score, and I’ll stop before I spend the rest of the article talking about The Witcher 3.
It’s a masterclass in game design. Cyberpunk 2077 eventually became another winner for CD Projekt Red, but the studio is under no illusion about the pressure on its shoulders to make The Witcher 4 as good as (if not better) than The Witcher 3.
“The Witcher 3 Was One of The Best Games Ever Made”
CD Projekt Red’s narrative director Philipp Weber spoke to GamesRadar. He addressed the main dilemma head-on: “[The] Witcher 3 was one of the best games ever made, ‘how are they going to top it?’ “I’m like ‘yeah, how are we going to do that?‘”
Weber was initially a Junior Quest Designer for The Witcher 3 before being promoted to a fully fledged Quest Designer on the game and its subsequent Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine DLC.
The narrative director isn’t using numbers (presumably review scores and copies sold) to determine The Witcher 4’s success: “I don’t see video games as mathematical.”
He explained further: “I think the way we want to do justice to the legacy of The Witcher 3 is to take the philosophy we had during The Witcher 3 – how to make a game, how to really care about these things, how to tell stories – and keep that philosophy. At the same time, there are new questions we want to answer, because this is supposed to feel like a true sequel, not just redoing what we did before. And I think it’s really trying to have that healthy mix of really moving forward and also trying out some new things, but doing justice to what was there, not trying to beat it.“
His—and CD Projekt Red’s goal—is to ensure “Some people will really love The Witcher 4, and hopefully those should be the people that love The Witcher 3, because the philosophy we had – how we make games, how we make quests, what The Witcher means to us – it’s the same one.“
These are the thoughts of one core The Witcher 4 dev. I can’t imagine how the rest of the team is feeling, to be honest. The Witcher 3’s legacy is forever etched into history. Fingers crossed, The Witcher 4 is another fine piece of art that lives long in the memory when it eventually launches. Let me know what you want to see from The Witcher 4 through the Insider Gaming forum.
For more IG news, read about Tales of the Shire being one of the worst-rated Lord of the Rings games in history, and news that WB Games Montréal is working on an AAA live-service title based on DC Comics.
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