CD Projekt Red has officially announced The Witcher IV, the first installment of a new trilogy in The Witcher series. The game shifts the protagonist role from Geralt of Rivia to his adopted daughter, Ciri, and is being developed on Unreal EngineUnreal Engine. A widely-used commercial game engine from Epic Games; powers many large-studio (AAA) games. UE5 is the current generation. 5 after CDPR transitioned away from their proprietary REDengine.
Protagonist & Narrative Shift
Ciri, previously a supporting and occasionally playable character in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, now serves as the main protagonist. Franchise and lore designer Cian Maher noted that “The Witcher as a title refers to both Geralt and Ciri and always has.” Unlike Geralt, a seasoned monster hunter, Ciri is depicted as an aspiring hunter forming her own codex. Ciara Berkeley replaces Jo Wyatt as the voice of Ciri, following a casting process that took over a year. Doug Cockle will reprise his role as Geralt. CDPR intends the game to serve as both an accessible entry point for new players and a continuation for veterans, while maintaining established canon to avoid contradictions with player choices from Wild Hunt.
Engine & Technical Approach
The migration to Unreal Engine 5 was driven by REDengine’s limitations—particularly its inability to support multiplayer development and the need for modifications with each new title. CDPR partnered with Epic Games to collaborate on open world capabilities and performance optimization. The game will use UE5’s hardware-accelerated ray tracingray tracing. A rendering technique that simulates how light bounces, for realistic shadows, reflections, and lighting — costly to compute. engine instead of software-based Lumen, along with Nvidia’s RTX Mega Geometry system to accelerate bounding volume hierarchy construction in high-geometry scenes. Animation features include a new horse physics system simulating muscular movement beneath the skin, plus Unreal Engine’s multi-character Motion Matching for mounting synchronization.
Development & Production
CDPR is adopting a “console-first” development approach, departing from their traditional PC-first strategy. Vice President Jakub Knapik explained that “it’s easier to scale up than down” once a technical foundation is established on console hardware—a lesson from Cyberpunk 2077’s launch issues on PS4 and Xbox One. Full production began in November 2024, with 513 employees on the project as of May 2026. A cinematic trailer was revealed at The Game Awards in December 2024, and a tech demo running on PlayStation 5 was showcased during the State of Unreal presentation in June 2025. The game is scheduled for PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S, with a release no earlier than 2027.
Why the engine swap is the real headline
The Ciri announcement is what the trailer leads with, but the structurally important decision in this reveal is the abandonment of REDengine. CDPR’s proprietary tech was, for a decade, a genuine competitive asset — it is the reason The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 looked a generation ahead of their peers at release, and it is the reason CDPR could ship a density of foliage, weather, and city lighting that off-the-shelf engines of that era struggled to match. Proprietary engines compound: every project pays into a toolchain only your studio understands, and for a while that flywheel produced best-in-class results.
The cost is exactly what CDPR is now naming. REDengine could not support multiplayer, and each new title required bespoke engine modifications — the team was re-factoring core systems per game rather than per generation. That is sustainable when you ship one franchise every five years; it is not when the roadmap is a trilogy plus a multiplayer Cyberpunk plus a Witcher remake in parallel. Partnering with Epic trades a proprietary advantage for platform leverage: CDPR stops maintaining a renderer, asset pipeline, and multiplayer stack and instead inherits Epic’s, while contributing back on the open-world layer where its expertise actually exceeds the baseline. For a studio that grew into a multi-project organization faster than its engine could scale, this is the correct call — even though it concedes the visual crown REDengine once held.
The protagonist pivot is a design decision, not just a marketing one
Replacing Geralt with Ciri is framed as a lore move, but the mechanics buried in the reveal tell a more deliberate story. Ciri is described as an “aspiring hunter forming her own codex” — which is a precise inversion of Geralt’s design. Geralt in Wild Hunt was a finished character: leveled, connected, his worldview fixed, his relationships already populated across two prior games. That made him a poor entry point and a great payoff for veterans, which is the opposite of what a new trilogy’s first installment needs. A learner protagonist resets the power curve, gives new players a character who is discovering the world alongside them, and lets the codex — the bestiary, the lore, the factionfaction. An in-game group or nation players can align with or fight against, with its own goals and reputation system. map — function as a tutorial object that is diegetically justified rather than menu-pasted on.
The constraint is canon. CDPR explicitly committed to maintaining established canon so player choices from Wild Hunt are not contradicted — a continuity tax with a combinatorially explosive dependency graph, whose standard industry escape hatch is to canonize one outcome and quietly nullify the rest. Whether CDPR honors Wild Hunt’s endings meaningfully rather than nominally is one of the two questions that will define whether this is a sequel or a soft reboot in a sequel’s clothes. The year-long casting and the retention of Doug Cockle as Geralt — even as a supporting presence — suggest the studio is investing in continuity as a felt thing, not a checked box.
Console-first is the Cyberpunk lesson, operationalized
The single most consequential line in the entire reveal is Knapik’s “it’s easier to scale up than down,” attributed directly to the Cyberpunk 2077 last-gen catastrophe. That launch was not a marketing failure; it was a pipeline failure. CDPR built for PC and the high end, then attempted to collapse that onto seven-year-old Jaguar-class console hardware, and the result ran so poorly that Sony pulled it from its store — an outcome with essentially no precedent for a title of that stature. The console-first pivot is CDPR saying, in process terms, that the constrained target is now the foundation, not the afterthought.
This matters beyond The Witcher IV. Building the baseline on PlayStation 5 fixed hardware means the performance budget, memory ceiling, and I/O assumptions are set by the weakest target the game must ship on — which is how you avoid repeating a Cyberpunk. The State of Unreal demo running on PS5 rather than a pimped PC is the visible evidence: the showcase platform is the floor, not the ceiling. The downside is real but bounded — UE5’s hardware ray tracing plus RTX Mega Geometry will stretch further on a 4090 than on a console — but a game that runs on all three targets at launch is worth more to CDPR’s still-recovering reputation than one that looks 15% better on a single one.
The take
Read together, a coherent strategy emerges: CDPR is de-risking on every axis it controls. Engine risk is offloaded to Epic. Accessibility risk is handled by a learner protagonist. Platform risk is handled by a console-first pipeline on the constrained target. Canon risk is budgeted for with a long casting process and retained legacy voice talent. Release risk is handled by a 2027 floor that gives a 513-person team room to actually finish.
What that leaves is the one risk CDPR cannot engineer away: whether a Witcher without Geralt carries the franchise’s emotional weight. Ciri is known and liked, but she has never been the load-bearing character, and “aspiring hunter” is a different fantasy than “weary professional.” The design answer is the codex-and-learning frame — a protagonist whose arc is about becoming the thing the player already associates with the brand. If that arc lands, The Witcher IV is a credible foundation for a trilogy. The 2025 tech demos will tell us about the engine. The 2026 gameplay reveals will tell us about the one thing that actually matters: whether Ciri, as written and performed across a year of casting, can hold the center of a world Geralt defined.