The first world premiere trailer shown at The Game Awards 2024 was CD Projekt RED's first look at The Witcher IV. We watched a pre-rendered cinematics running on an unreleased GeForce RTX graphics card (likely the RTX 5090 that's rumored to launch next month) featuring the familiar progression of a The Witcher quest. A young woman is pushed to sacrifice herself to a cursed monster who lives in a nearby forest, only for Cirilla Fiona Riannon to step in and kill the monster first to save the girl... or so she thought.
Once Ciri goes back to the village, she finds the girl dead after being stabbed for not going through the supposedly protective ritual. That's when she utters that monsters, as in humans, not gods, are here.
It's about as The Witcher as you could hope for. There's no release window, of course, but the press release does share a few details on the game. Sebastian Kalemba, Game Director on The Witcher IV, stated:
We're kicking off a brand-new Witcher saga, this time with Ciri as the heart of the story! It feels so good to finally be able to say those words — for the longest time we knew that we wanted Ciri to be the protagonist of The Witcher IV; it just felt natural to us and we believe that Ciri deserves it. In this game we want to explore what it means to truly become a witcher by following Ciri on her Path. This trailer is a taste of both that, and just how dark and grounded the world of The Witcher can be.
Powered by the same tech that The Witcher IV is built on, using assets and models from the game itself, the trailer aims to provide players with a cinematic look at the kind of experience the game aspires to provide.
The game is in full production, and we might be able to play it within the next couple of years.
