The Witcher 4's narrative lead won't be turning his back on some of The Witcher 3's best bits: those awesome, multi-layered side quests.
Philipp Weber joined The Witcher 3's team as a quest designer early on in development and, in an interview with GamesRadar+, he recalled that the earliest bit of feedback he received from the studio was that "We don't do fetch quests." Hear, hear. Now that Weber's leading the narrative on The Witcher 4 a decade later, he told us it's a rule he's holding on to for the open-world RPG sequel.
The Witcher 3's side quests really made the game stand out in a crowded genre, whether they were funny 10-minute distractions or multi-quest, extraordinarily detailed, hour-long endeavours that wouldn't look out of place in the main story. Pawel Sasko - also a quest designer at the time, now the director of Cyberpunk 2 - said "the goal" was to replicate the feeling of putting down a good book.
Filling a massive world with so many juicy stories is no easy feat, though. Weber remembered that every designer wrote "10 times as many ideas as those that landed in the game," so there's tons of brainstorming that takes place before the team lands on something as interesting and now-iconic as the Bloody Baron questline, for example.
CD Projekt Red developers are definitely taking what worked in The Witcher 3 and sprinting with them in The Witcher 4, but the studio's also been outspoken about the fact that it can't "copy our own tricks all over again and again." Here's hoping the team can strike a nice balance between old and new stuff.
The Witcher 4 lead is "pretty confident" about the series' new saga: "We know how to handle it [...] we made it popular"
