Ciri Takes the Lead Role in ‘The Witcher 4’

Following up on its neo-noir sci-fi RPG Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt RED is going back to its roots with The Witcher IV, its first full mainline game in the grim fairy tale-inspired fantasy series since 2015.

The sequel’s reveal marked the start of the 10th annual Game Awards, the combination trailer fest/award show (more of the former, to be honest) that has served as a bit of a spiritual successor to E3 since the expo’s unceremonious death during the pandemic.

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Like The Witcher 3, The Witcher 4 is a single-player RPG, but unlike its predecessors, Geralt will not be our lead monster hunter this time around. Instead, his apprentice and adopted daughter Ciri will be taking the reigns as protagonist.

While tonight’s trailer stopped short of showing gameplay, IGN, which falls under the same parent company as Lifehacker, has exclusive interviews going more in-depth about what players can expect from both the game as a whole as well as its lore.

The Witcher 3 was lauded when it released in 2015, currently holding a score of 92 on Metacritic. In particular, critics praised the game’s approach to narrative, side quests, and open-world design.

From the short sequence shown so far, all of those pillars seem to be intact, with tonight’s trailer showing Ciri taking a job in a rural village and facing some unexpected consequences for saving a “chosen one” from a monster attack.

Outside of the game itself, tech nerds have a little bit to look forward to as well, as the trailer also had a small note saying its cinematics were “pre-rendered in Unreal Engine 5 on an unannounced Nvidia GeForce RTX GPU.” While the game’s release window is still up in the air, the note confirms that developers already have their hands on the anticipated RTX 5000 GPU series, indicating PC gamers might see concrete details on their launch as soon as next month’s CES.