The Witcher 4 is easily one of the most exciting upcoming RPGs on the horizon, and the devs at CD Projekt Red have now revealed that they have "a huge team" focused on making its world feel "believable" and "grounded."
Speaking in a new episode of CD Projekt Red's AnsweRED podcast (further below), senior communication manager Paweł Burza, game director Sebastian Kalemba, environment art director Michał Janiszewski, and engineering production manager Jan Hermanowicz discuss the process of worldbuilding, with Hermanowicz noting that a believable world should have consistency. Janiszewski adds to this, saying that worldbuilding is about immediately immersing the player – "everything clicks together," he adds, pointing to "the environment, the characters, and the way that everything is laid out on the level itself." He reiterates: "Everything needs to be consistent."
CD Projekt Red has obviously pulled this off many times before, with the likes of The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, so the studio really knows what it's doing in this regard.
"It is important for us for the player to get the world [as] believable as possible," Janiszewski says.
Going on to talk about The Witcher 4 specifically, Janiszewski explains that CD Projekt Red has "a huge team that is taking care of the believability." He references a point that Hermanowicz makes earlier in the conversation about building environments like forests, where effort is made to ensure that the foliage and trees used would actually belong there, adding that this large team is in place since "even the line of the trees need to be specifically created."
He continues: "We have some tools that are supporting us, and we are building inside of our worldbuilding team tools that will make our work a little bit faster and a little bit more, I would say, easier to populate the whole world."
We still don't know exactly when The Witcher 4 is supposed to launch – right now, we've not even been given a vague release window. However, anyone hungry for the next installment can be somewhat reassured by whatever these "worldbuilding tools" the studio has up its sleeve are, so long as they have the power to speed up the RPG's development, even if only a little bit.
In the meantime, be sure to check out our roundup of the best RPGs you can play now.
