When you’re a gaming developer known for the “great titles” you produce and the incredible quality that lies within those titles, you are expected to maintain that quality throughout future games. That might sound a bit unfair, as everyone has “down points,” but for the gaming industry, if you’re able to make one great game of a certain nature and quality, there’s little excuse for suddenly making something that is so broken it hurts. For CD Projekt Red, it went from “peak” to “broken,” and it’s fighting to ensure The Witcher 4 is not repeating past mistakes.
As we reported earlier, one key thing that CD Projekt Red is doing is switching engines for its upcoming project, finally embracing Unreal Engine 5 in a bid to try and do “multiple projects at once.” One of those projects is The Witcher 4, which has been shrouded in secrecy ever since its first cryptic teaser came out. Team member Charles Tremblay talked with Eurogamer about the title and promised that the team would not be “going backward” with this title but pushing forward in “bigger” ways:
“Again, I will not say it’s easy. But I think that we have some cool stuff going, and hopefully that will have some good showcase [of the technology]. The only thing I will say is that changing the tech for us does not change the fact that we always will be ambitious. And the next game we do will not be smaller, and it will not be worse. So it will be better, bigger, greater than The Witcher 3, it will be better than Cyberpunk – because for us, it’s unacceptable [to launch that way]. We don’t want to go back.”
Many gamers will be happy to hear that, as they don’t want the company to go backward in that respect. They want CD Projekt Red to return to the greatness it had when the team brought Geralt of Rivia into the gaming space. The original trilogy might have taken a little bit to find its true fanbase among the RPG faithful, but by the time the third game came around it was hailed as one of the best RPG trilogies ever, with the 3rdtitle winning “Game of the Year” awards, being praised for its robust DLC content, and sell tens of millions of units on its own.
So, if CD Projekt Red wants the 4th entry to be “greater” than that, it certainly has its work cut out for it.
