There’s no better way to get into the Witcher mojo than by working on Geralt’s last trip to sunny, disease-free Velen.
Image credit: VG247/CD Projekt
While we’d not seen The Witcher 4 in action prior to last year’s edition of The Game Awards, when it got itsfirst trailer, CD Projekt has been beavering away at it for a while.
According to the game’s narrative director, its team also had the perfect task to help it get back into the swing of thing quest-wise thanks to The Witcher 3’s 2022 next-gen update, which offered us all the chance to bring a bit of TV Witcher to our video game Witchering, even if Jim Trinca wasn’t entirely convinced it was necessary.
Philipp Weber, who served as a quest designer on TW3 and Cyberpunk 2077 before stepping up into the aforementioned role for TW4, took the chance to commemorate the work the studio did on ‘In the Eternal Fire’s Shadow’. In case the name doesn’t ring a bell, it’s the quest that sees Geralt enter the scarlet fog plague victim-filled Devil’s Pit and come out with the diagram for some forgotten wolf school gear.
Basically, it’s an interesting way to get your hands on the armour that Henry Cavill – and now Liam Hemsworth – rock while playing Gerry in The Witcher Netflix series. The devs could have just dumped it in a random chest, but nope, you get to battle a long-missing Witcher posessed by a Red Miasmal, in a mission that has some fun touches like a cutscene of Geralt himself getting possessed playing if you die during the boss fight.
If you’re worried about The Witcher 4 feeling too different from its predecessor, don’t worry, because a lot more staff from the third game are still at CD Projekt Red than you might have feared
That includes a dev who’s been there since the first game.
“Two years ago we released a new quest for The Witcher 3,” Weber wrote of this nice little adventure, “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.”
Given a lot of these folks who weren’t new hires ahead of The Witcher 4’s development cycle has probably just finished playing a part in getting Cyberpunk 2077 out of the door and helping it recover its repuation from that infamously rocky lauch via a whole bunch of updates and a killer DLC, you can understand why having this set the table for them fully hopping back into Witcher mode with their fresh peers would be so memorable.
It’s a cool peek behind the curtain, even if I don’t expect to find Weber somehow actually meant the vibe matched because we’ll also be stealing Henry Cavill’s fit in The Witcher 4. But, to be fair, you never know.
If you’rte desperate to get a bit of a taste of playing as The Witcher 4’s version of Ciri right now, you’ll be glad to hear that Witcher 3 modders were very quick to give that game’s version of everyone’s favourite Child of the Elder Blood a makeover to match that TGAs reveal trailer.
