The Witcher 4 Will Push Morally Grey Choices Further, CD Projekt Red Says
The Witcher 4 will continue CD Projekt Red’s focus on morally ambiguous decisions, with Joint CEO Adam Badowski saying the studio wants player choices and their consequences to leave a lasting impression. Speaking at the International Festival of Comics and Games in Łódź, in comments relayed by the Facebook fan page Wiedźminlandia, Badowski also explained that the long production cycles behind CD Projekt Red’s RPGs are heavily influenced by the amount of work placed into narrative development rather than an attempt to follow changing industry trends.
According to Badowski, stories are repeatedly rewritten during production to strengthen their emotional impact, with narrative decisions influencing development from beginning to end. For The Witcher 4, that philosophy will again include choices where the consequences may not be immediately obvious. Badowski said the studio wants those decisions to "make a lasting impression on the player," continuing an approach familiar from The Witcher 3, where apparently reasonable actions could produce unexpected results much later in a quest or storyline.
The comments fit CD Projekt Red’s wider design philosophy rather than confirming a specific new branching system. In a recent official discussion about level design, developers explained that the studio focuses its resources on choices capable of producing meaningful differences across narrative, gameplay, and level design, while also ensuring players understand that their decisions have consequences. The studio has not yet detailed how extensively The Witcher 4 will branch, how many endings it may contain, or whether major decisions will affect the world more broadly than in previous games.
Badowski also briefly discussed combat, describing The Witcher 4 as an evolution of the system used in The Witcher 3 rather than outlining a complete redesign. Few additional details were shared, but CD Projekt Red is developing the game around a new technical foundation after moving away from REDengine. We recently covered why CD Projekt Red moved The Witcher 4 to Unreal Engine 5, with the studio emphasizing scalability across several simultaneous projects rather than problems with its previous engine.
The discussion also touched on the possibility of eventually remaking The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. Badowski pointed toward Fool’s Theory CEO Jakub Rokosz, whose studio is already developing the remake of the original Witcher and who considers The Witcher 2 his favorite entry. That comment leaves the possibility open, but CD Projekt Red has not announced a Witcher 2 remake or confirmed that such a project is currently in development.
The important part of Badowski’s comments is not simply that choices will have consequences. That has been fundamental to The Witcher for years. The Witcher 4 appears to be preserving the uncertainty around those decisions, where the player may understand the immediate choice without knowing exactly how it will affect characters or events later.
That approach works best when consequences feel connected to the decision rather than arbitrary. CD Projekt Red has plenty of experience with morally grey storytelling, but The Witcher 4 now has the challenge of preserving that identity while introducing Ciri as the lead and building the first mainline entry around an entirely new development pipeline.
Do you prefer Witcher choices where the consequences remain unclear until much later, or would you rather have a better idea of what each decision could lead to?
