The Witcher 4 will be "better, bigger, greater" than The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077: "We don't want to go back"

The Witcher 4 Polaris
(Image credit: CD Projekt RED)

Fans have been yearning for The Witcher 4 since The Witcher 3 — the seductive action RPG — released in 2015, but with no luck. Developer CD Projekt Red has been silent about The Witcher 4's story and official release date, though the developer did, however, recently assure fans that The Witcher 4 will be its most impressive game launch yet.

"The next game we do will not be smaller, and it will not be worse," CD Projekt vice president of technology Charles Tremblay told Eurogamer. "It will be better, bigger, greater than The Witcher 3, it will be better than Cyberpunk because for us, it's unacceptable [to launch so abysmally]."

"We don't want to go back," Tremblay continued. 

CD Projekt has a history of overpromising. It infamously built up Cyberpunk 2077 as a revolutionary RPG for years before the game ultimately suffered an underwhelming, buggy launch in 2020.

Still, Tremblay's comments will undoubtedly invigorate some The Witcher fans; The Witcher 3 is an approximately 50-hour game, and it offers a fantasy open-world that often looks like a heavenly painting. Anything bigger and better than that seems like no less of a miracle than creating the universe. 

How successful CD Projekt is at raising the bar, of course, remains to be seen. In any case, the developer's impressive overhaul of Cyberpunk 2077 in 2023 certainly suggests that CD Projekt has learned something in the years since The Witcher 3 released. 

"Even if there will be some 'sweaty moments' and maybe even some bad stuff happening," Tremblay said about The Witcher 4, "I think that we will try everything we can to make it even more than what we achieved in the past years."

The Witcher 4 dev says it takes 5-6 years to make a game after the idea's conception - but isn't saying when The Witcher 4 was thought up.

Ashley Bardhan
Contributor

Ashley Bardhan is a critic from New York who covers gaming, culture, and other things people like. She previously wrote Inverse’s award-winning Inverse Daily newsletter. Then, as a Kotaku staff writer and Destructoid columnist, she covered horror and women in video games. Her arts writing has appeared in a myriad of other publications, including Pitchfork, Gawker, and Vulture.