The Witcher 4 director wants tough choices in RPGs, "even if the emotion in the end is sadness," because "we want players to feel rewarded"

While knowing that The Witcher 4 is on the way after that snazzy trailer at The Game Awards 2024, it has still been a long time since we had any new Witcher, put into perspective by The Witcher 3 celebrating its 10th anniversary. To celebrate this milestone, CD Projekt Red talked with IGN about their approach to in-game choices, which led to some interesting comments from the director of the upcoming sequel.

Both The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 are packed with impactful choices, which will affect how a questline branches, your relationship with, or even the fates of certain characters, with some even transferring throughout the series (well, in The Witcher's case, there's no Cyberpunk sequel yet). The Witcher 2's second chapter was massively different depending on who you decided to ally with.

However, Sebastian Kalemba, game director on The Witcher 4 explained his approach to decision making in RPGs, saying, "Whatever the choice is and whatever the consequence is, we want players to feel rewarded, even if the emotion in the end is sadness." Kalemba adds, "If this is coherent with the emotional journey we're delivering, [it will allow] the player to feel [that they are] okay with this consequence." So if you were hoping you wouldn't have to make any tough choices in The Witcher 4, I think you're out of luck.

Kalemba also talked about the team's goals for The Witcher 4, saying, "We want to put player agency in the center... We want players to be able to really sense these opportunities and to go in-depth when it comes to choice and consequences." He added, "We want to give players more tools, more opportunities, to be able to feel that 'I am the player and I define my experience.'"

CD Projekt quest designer Paweł Gąska chimed in on this, saying, "We want the player to see that even a good choice can have bad consequences, and that a bad choice can still be justified because of something else you focused on." Gąska also gave major praise to the narrative team, saying “As quest designers, we can think of good choices, good dilemmas, good themes, but it's the writers who have to deliver the dialogues that will actually elicit emotions in the players,” adding, “It's the cinematics [team] and the animators who have to give [the story] to you in a way that you will actually feel it.”

The Witcher 4 lead is "pretty confident" about the series' new saga: "We know how to handle it [...] we made it popular."