The Witcher 4 open-world map and new monsters teased

The “tricky” boss fight is giving me some Psycho Mantis vibes

The Director (Sebastian Kalemba) and the Executive Producer (Gosia Mitręga) revealed some details about The Witcher 4’s map and some of its new enemies in a recent interview, including a boss fight with one enemy they describe as a “tricky, tricky, tricky b*stard.”

Thank you in advance to Ashley Bardhan over on Gamesradar+ for spotting this one, and to Parris Lilly for the original source for the interview!

Gamertag Radio’s Parris Lilly got to sit down with some of CD Projekt RED’s key staff members post-The Game Awards, who were keen to share some new info regarding their upcoming game.

“Talking about regions,” Kalemba told Lilly, “you’ll experience completely new regions… there’s going to be plenty of new monsters.”

Kalemba specifically mentions that Bauk, the monster in the trailer for The Witcher 4 shown at The Game Awards, won’t be as straightforward of a fight as you might have assumed.

“Bauk, the monster… he actually plays with her own fears… you will be able to have an impact on that story…”

“When you look at The Witcher, the way we dealt with the word ‘monster,’ we deal with it in a completely different perspective– starting from The Witcher 1… you deal with a regular monster, then you had humans that behave monstrously. Then, here, you have inner demons that you have to fight first to be able to finally spot him, encounter him and to kill it… he’s a very complex monster, very powerful.”

Obviously Kalemba can’t be too specific on the details at the moment, but his reference to the fact that your choices throughout the story can impact the fight with Bauk makes it sound like those “inner demons” you have to face could be the result of decisions Ciri has made throughout The Witcher 4’s missions.

Or maybe you can just plug in a second controller to defeat him, Psycho Mantis-style.