The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was a landmark RPG, boasting some of the most thought-out, rich questlines video games had ever seen at the time. To this day, navigating the Bloody Baron’s bloody history as we search for Ciri remains one of the most intricate, heartbreaking stories in the medium. The sequel has a lot to live up to, not only following on from a modern classic, but RPGs that have since redefined the genre further like Baldur’s Gate 3.
Features Editor Andrew King put forward an interesting question, “How will RPGs have changed by the time The Witcher 4 arrives?” Starfield’s lax continuation of old Bethesda motifs didn’t cut it because we’ve come to expect so much more, and BG3 will no doubt shift the landscape going forward, much like Breath of the Wild did for open-world games in 2017. Will The Witcher 4 cut it if it’s merely more of the same? Probably not, but CD Projekt Red isn’t just looking at iterating on a near-perfect experience, it wants to reinvent the wheel.
Our priority is always trying to break boundaries. We want to go beyond them. We want to try and do something new compared to what’s currently in roleplaying games, especially since we work within that genre and target RPG fans.
Geralt’s story looks to be over as the next Witcher is being billed as the beginning of a new saga. That means it’s designed as a jumping-on point for newcomers, which gives CDPR ample freedom to “break boundaries” and “go beyond them”. Lofty ambitions are welcome in an industry stagnated by triple-A games and studios playing it safe, but this is less a path to innovation, and more watching history repeat itself.
Cyberpunk 2077 was ambitious, to say the least. CDPR announced it in 2013, seven years before launch, and after its re-reveal at E3, continued to hype it up with promises it could never deliver.
We were told it would have one of the most believable open-world cities to date, that V’s apartment would be a “microsociety of its own”, that there would be randomly generated car ambushes, and that Night City would have incredibly immersive dynamic weather that inhabitants would realistically react to. So many of these exciting prospects simply proved untrue at launch, which in itself was infamously buggy. Even years later, many of the features and ideas we were told about have yet to materialize.
CDPR wanted to break the mold and redefine open-world games with an RPG like no other, then it handed us a half-eaten slice of cold toast. Now, it wants to break the RPG mold with The Witcher 4, putting a target on its back all over again instead of keeping its feet on the ground.
Making these bold claims puts enormous pressure on the game. If it’s billed as a groundbreaking, genre-defining epic, just being ‘good’ won’t be enough. This is the problem with setting your sights too high. Before we’ve seen a single frame of footage, CDPR is back to its antics of drumming up unrealistic hype. It doesn’t bode well for how The Witcher 4 will be marketed, since it’s already all about being the biggest, best, and most daring when just living up to its predecessor will be more than enough.
Let audiences decide if you’ve broken through the boundaries and redefined the RPG landscape, don’t make that promise beforehand. Baldur’s Gate 3 wasn’t billed as the game to shift mountains, it unexpectedly dominated the zeitgeist and dwarfed Bethesda’s first game in nearly ten years through actions, not buzzwords. Elden Ring was much the same. In fact, Starfield’s boasting about a vast galaxy of over 1,000 planets to explore set up a tantalising universe we were all excited to unpack, only for the stark reality of its emptiness to hit that much harder.
If this is how CDPR continues to talk about The Witcher 4, it will set its own comparisons. Wanting to do “something new” like no other RPG sets the bar far too high. It’s okay for a sequel to simply live up to its predecessor, to iterate and fine-tune. The Witcher 4 doesn’t have to break boundaries or redefine what it means to be an RPG, and setting those expectations already is to shackle the game before it’s even revealed.
Baldur’s Gate 3’s Patches Are So Good That I’m Scared To Keep Playing
I’m nearing the titular city and scared of missing what future patches have to offer.
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