The Witcher 4 is on it’s way to feature far more realism and depth to it’s non-playing-characters than we’ve ever seen in a CD Projekt Red title, according to Game Director Sebastian Kalemba. In a recent interview with Gamertag Radio Co-host Paris Lilly, he states that the developer is aiming “to make every single [The Witcher 4] NPC looking like they’re living, with their own story.”
If you’ve watched the reveal trailer for The Witcher 4, you can sense that there’s going to be a ton of NPC’s in the small village areas of the game, and it looks like each of them will be brought to lifelike realism in terms of their actions and behaviors in the game. Of course it requires a lot of technological horsepower to make that happen but developer CD Project Red is well known for pushing the technological boundaries in all of their games, from 2015’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt to Cyberpunk 2077, each of their titles can be called as sort of technical marvels of their times, even besides the usage of groundbreaking graphical advancements. So it’s understandable that the devs will bring that same level of technical breakthrough in the Witcher 4.
“This is exactly how villages are working, right? Every single character has its own role,” Kalemba says. Stromford (the name of the village shown in the reveal trailer) is “super isolated, followed by superstitions and beliefs that are false. […] They believe that, in this forest, there is a god.”
Of course, it’s also worth noting that their games, despite having massive and dense Worlds, always have been kind of lackluster when it comes to the NPC’s of those Worlds and compared to many other titles that feature stunning Open Worlds like Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2, Grand Theft Auto 5 or even Betheda’s Skyrim, CD Projekt Red’s NPC’s felt a lot less lifelike and even mechanical in comparison. But it sure looks like the devs are going to turn things around and create some of the most realistic depictions of NPC’s we’ve seen in gaming.
“We’re definitely pushing the quality of NPC – the way they look, their behavior, their facial performance – as much as possible,” Kalemba states, “because we want to make even more immersive experience than we used to. We are trying to push the bar here.”
The Witcher 4 is currently in development and no official release date has been announced so far. The game is using Unreal Engine 5 and it’s looking pretty incredible, as seen from the recent Reveal trailer.
