Direction

Yesterday brought our first proper look at The Witcher 4, thanks to a highly impressive tech demo, and the Ciri-led sequel is now CDPR’s next big thing. PCG’s Josh Wolens recently sat down with several of the studio’s core figures to discuss the series’ past and future and, with this happening around The Witcher 3’s tenth anniversary, one prominent topic was how the gaming landscape has changed over that time.

The Witcher 4 will release in a very different world from The Witcher 3, and there are several high-profile examples of studios that don’t seem to have kept pace with the times. Bioware’s Dragon Age: Veilguard, for example, was a perfectly decent RPG, but the visuals aside it was almost like a game you could’ve been playing in 2015. But then there are those games that do feel like they’re pushing the RPG forward, like Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and perhaps most prominently Baldur’s Gate 3. So where is CDPR and The Witcher 4 going to find itself?

“Bioware has changed for sure, but the industry has changed too,” says CDPR co-CEO Adam Badowski. “We have a different strategy for our company. We definitely would like to continue keeping and truly understanding our core rules, how we develop our games, and of course, on top of that, we need to find new things, especially in gameplay, because there’s not such a great progress when it comes to good stories.

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“So here we feel very strongly at the same time, so many great things happened in gameplay [since The Witcher 3]. What are players’ expectations here? And there are great games, great mechanics and plus UI [improvements]. So this is the idea for our development, and we are focusing on that, but at the same time we strongly believe in the core of what we are doing here.”

Badowski goes on to say that he thinks one of CDPR’s strengths is that, while The Witcher and Cyberpunk are very different worlds, at their heart are some pretty similar goals.

“So even if we have multiple games, it doesn’t mean that we are focusing on one big thing, because our games are similar when it comes to the core aspects,” says Badowski. “Of course, Cyberpunk is different from the Witcher, but different enough to feel that it’s something maybe more for me, less for you. But I think the core, the pillars, how we make games stay the same and we continue. Maybe that’s the difference, the difference between our strategy and Bioware’s strategy these days.”

(Image credit: CD Projekt Red)

To get down to brass tacks, then, what does CDPR see when it’s looking at the likes of KCD2 and BG3?

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“I love Kingdom Come because of the realism and the feeling, the sense of humor,” says Badowski. Would he even say it’s a little Witcher-y?

“Thank you,” laughs Badowski, before going on to explain how some of the more simulation-y and systems-heavy aspects of KCD2 are the things CDPR watches with interest, because this is partly The Witcher 4’s direction of travel.

“The Kingdom Come kind of simulation, it’s great,” says Badowski. “There’s so many options, you can change the world, it’s super great. And we would like to keep that, we’d like to follow this trend as well. So these are our next steps for sure, and it’s kind of a similar challenge to what we have in The Witcher 3 because of the open world and storytelling here, freedom of choices. But at the same time, we would like to build very fleshy, very well-motivated characters. So it’s kind of in contradiction from time-to-time. That’s a great design challenge.”

With Larian the influence is less direct. “In Larian’s case it’s turn-based so it’s a different kind of game, and the way you interact with characters is totally different,” says Bakowski. “We like to fully build the characters, understand the past and the future of the character motivation. That’s why it takes so much time. [In BG3] there are great characters as well but sometimes your choices, because there’s freedom of choices in Larian’s work, it pushes you to use different tricks than ours. But I think we observe each other, and there are not that many games like that, so that’s natural, yeah, and we see how players react, how fans react to those tactics.”

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It’s a theme that joint CEO Michał Nowakowski echoes: Baldur’s Gate 3 has clearly impressed an awful lot of people at CDPR, even if they’re conscious that The Witcher is always going to be a different type of RPG.

“I think we’re still more in the, you know, we’re a big open world,” says Nowakowski. “But a lot of what Baldur’s Gate 3 showed was an inspiration, and to be honest there’s no shame in that. I think everybody who launches games nowadays is looking back on what was done before, and is looking at what worked and what was great and how and if they can fit it into whatever they are doing.

“So for sure there was a lot of inspiration and what BG3 did, but I think we’re still more sticking to what was The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk, even if we don’t want to just make another game like that, just with better graphics. We do want to innovate in terms of what’s available in terms of gameplay and so on. I hope when the time comes, that’s going to become clear for the fans as well.”

If that’s all sounding a little fuzzy, Nowakowski circles back to make it clear what CDPR is not doing:

“It’s a bit of an unclear answer, but to make it more clear, we definitely are not going to make a game like Larian did,” says Nowakowski. “That’s the kind of game they can make. But a lot of stuff with how the characters can interact with the world and what it does was for sure some inspiration to us.”

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