The Witcher 4 Dev Reveals It Used A Witcher 3 Quest to Set the Vibe for New Designers

The Witcher 4 was finally revealed with a Game Awards trailer in 2024, showing that the next game in the series will see Ciri taking a starring role. Other than that, there’s still plenty we don’t know about The Witcher 4, but one of the game’s leads did reveal that a Witcher 3 quest played an important part in its development.

As it turns out, a quest added to The Witcher 3 in 2022 is also an important milestone for its sequel. As part of a patch that added ray tracing, a photo mode, and other content updates, The Witcher 3 also got a brand-new quest called “In the Eternal Fire’s Shadow,” which rewarded players with a new armor set modeled after Geralt’s costume in The Witcher TV series. Developer CD Projekt Red also used it as a chance to switch gears from Cyberpunk 2077 back into Witcher mode, it was recently revealed.

“Two years ago, we released a new quest for The Witcher 3,” Philipp Weber, narrative director for The Witcher 4, wrote on social media. “New designers and writers worked on it preparing for The Witcher 4, together with one of our most senior quest designers, who is with us since The Witcher 1. All in all, it was the perfect start to getting back into the vibe.”

That doesn’t necessarily mean The Witcher 4 will take any cues from “In the Eternal Fire’s Shadow,” but it’s an interesting quest to look at as a way to get new designers up to speed with The Witcher 4. In the quest, Geralt investigates a mine called the Devil’s Pit, where victims of a supernatural plague have been locked up by members of a church. Geralt does exactly what you’d expect him to — head inside to save the trapped villagers, root around the environment for clues, and eventually slay the demon responsible while heaping scorn on the church’s inhumanity. Along the way, he meets up with an older member of the School of the Wolf, Geralt’s own Witcher school, for some hefty lore drops.

It’s not exactly a remarkable quest in many ways, playing out in a formula seen across The Witcher 3. But it could point to some themes the development team has been chewing on while making the sequel. Much of The Witcher 3 focuses on the ways that human cruelty can be more dangerous than literal monsters roaming the world, particularly when it comes to institutions with power over their members.

Needing to rescue plague-stricken citizens from a regressive church also feels somewhat reminiscent of what was shown in the trailer for The Witcher 4. In the game’s reveal, Ciri does the expected monster-slaying routine in an effort to save a young woman from being used as a human sacrifice. Both the quest and the trailer hinge on a group of people using religion as an excuse to dehumanize others, leaving the maligned Witchers to act in their defense.

Taken together, “In the Eternal Fire’s Shadow” and The Witcher 4 trailer also suggest that CD Projekt Red hasn’t lost any of its edge in the decade since the last Witcher game. One ending of Geralt’s new quest sees him possessed by the very demon he’s attempting to slay, and The Witcher 4’s trailer, Ciri fails to save the woman’s life despite her best efforts and ends up despised by the rest of the village. Taking on the role of a female Witcher in a world as rife with misogyny as the setting of The Witcher presents a lot of opportunities to explore humanity’s prejudices and injustices, and if what we’ve seen from The Witcher 4’s team so far is anything to go by, they won’t be shying away from the darker implications of that.

While Weber’s reveal might shed some light on what to expect from the tone of The Witcher 4, it unfortunately doesn’t give us any more concrete information about the sequel. Aside from the fact that it exists and stars Ciri, CD Projekt Red has revealed nothing about the upcoming game, including its release date. Whenever it arrives, it’s a safe bet that Ciri’s path won’t be any easier than Geralt’s, and that could present an even more complicated look at the harsh world of The Witcher.