A senior dev working on The Witcher 4 has admitted he’s concerned about how CD Projekt Red is going to better its critically-acclaimed predecessor.
The Witcher 3 is one of the most beloved games ever made and is widely ranked among the best RPGs of all time. So, when CD Projekt Red announced that they were working on a new entry in the series, based on Andrzej Sapkowski’s fantasy novels, fans were understandably overjoyed.
But how do you follow up such an adored game that is still talked about nearly a decade after it first launched? That’s the question that the development team is currently facing, and the scale of the task isn’t lost on them.
The Witcher 4 dev doesn’t know how they’ll top Witcher 3
Speaking in an interview with GamesRadar+, The Witcher 4 narrative director Philipp Weber said that he was well aware of online debates asking, “‘Witcher 3 was one of the best games ever made, how are they going to top it?'”
“I’m like ‘yeah, how are we going to do that?'” he replied.
However, he went on to say that this isn’t impacting development, as video games are “subjective” and it’s impossible to top The Witcher 3 in a “mathematical” way.
“I think the way we want to do justice to the legacy of The Witcher 3 is to take the philosophy we had during The Witcher 3 – how to make a game, how to really care about these things, how to tell stories – and keep that philosophy,” Weber explained.
“At the same time, there are new questions we want to answer, because this is supposed to feel like a true sequel, not just redoing what we did before.”
To hammer this point home, he revealed that his favorite game in the series is Witcher 1, despite the many problems that many fans have with it.
So, knowing that’s making a sequel that is universally preferred by everyone is incredibly unlikely, the approach is simple:
“Just make sure that some people will really love The Witcher 4, and hopefully those should be the people that love The Witcher 3, because the philosophy we had – how we make games, how we make quests, what The Witcher means to us – it’s the same one.”
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