CDPR wants Witcher 4 players to make intuitive decisions that lead to impactful consequences

CD Projekt RED is taking all of its best learnings from previous games to fashion unique and impactful questlines for The Witcher 4.

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The Witcher 3 is known for its remarkable side quests, but CD Projekt wants to go even further with Ciri's new adventure. The devs want to create stories in The Witcher 4 that are so engrossing that you completely forget about the main quest, ones that are filled with difficult decisions that lead to emotionally-driven consequences.

In a recent interview with GamesRadar, The Witcher 4 narrative director Philipp Weber discusses CDPR's thinking here, saying that it's important to give players the opportunity to intuit these decision points. But the game also has to better show the consequences of these choices, Weber says.

"In The Witcher 3 we had a very good balance of still being natural about it, but usually you always knew when there was a consequence for your actions.

"That's an example of a lesson where we looked back at The Witcher 3 and said 'OK, we have to be able to hit that one again', because choice and consequence is one of the standards that we have and want to uphold, and I think The Witcher 3 did it perfectly."

"We want to make sure that when we have consequences, there really is a good reason for the player to see them. Sometimes in the past we would try to be very subtle and very naturalistic about consequences because often a character doesn't tell you 'Well, I'm doing this now because you said this two hours ago'. That can feel unnatural, so we try to avoid that, but the result is that then, for a lot of people, it's invisible that this is a consequence at all."

Of course, all of this remains speculative until CD Projekt actually shows off a quest in action. But for now, it should give fans great confidence that the team is looking to evolve the age-old Witcher formula and make it better than before.

The studio recently made waves with its impressive Witcher 4 tech demo on Unreal Engine 5, and while it doesn't represent actual gameplay, it's still an eye-opening look at what's possible in the game.