“There are no gods here. There are only monsters.”

Ciri standing in a crowd of villagers in The Witcher 4Image credit: CD Projekt

CD Projekt have screened the first trailer for The Witcher 4, the next instalment in their fantasy monster-slaying series. It’s another single player open world RPG, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s Ciri is the protagonist. In fact, she’s the protagonist for a whole new Witcher saga, though there’s a tease at the end of the footage that crusty old Geralt may return as well.

Revealed at the Game Awards just now, The Witcher 4 video is both a showcase for the engine technology, “pre-rendered in a custom build of Unreal Engine 5 on an unannounced NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPU”, and a demonstration of the kind of quest you might encounter in the game, which looks to follow squarely in The Witcher 3’s bootprints.

We see Ciri take on a contract to save a girl from being sacrificed to a spidery forest creature. “Aiming to slay the beast and save the girl at the same time, Ciri finds herself at odds with the prejudices and superstitions of the people she tries to protect, leading her to confront a painful witcher lesson: that monsters come in all forms,” comments a press release on the official site.

The trailer also shows off a few of Ciri’s tools, including Witcher spells and a chain-hook weapon you’ll seemingly use to stop monsters darting about, readying them for your silver sword.

Ciri won’t just be the star of this game: she’ll helm the next few Witcher games, according to game director Sebastian Kalemba.

“We’re kicking off a brand-new Witcher saga, this time with Ciri as the heart of the story!” he said in the press release. “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.”

For clarity, The Witcher 4 is the project previously codenamed Polaris. CD Projekt have plenty other irons in the fire. What do you make of it all?