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