Debunking some narratives, why Witcher 4 will be incredible and a message to the fans.
TLDR: Don't believe in fake narratives; ignore them and don't give them power. CDPR is stronger than ever, so let them cook. Be happy we have a game to be excited for.
We unfortunately live in times where false narratives and fearmongering against something you don't like for arbitrary reasons are a thing. So I've taken the time to debunk some of those claims and explain how and why they don't even make sense to begin with.
Starting with the most common one, "Everyone who made the Witcher 3 has left the studio; therefore, Witcher 4 will suck."
First up, those who did leave did so many years ago and weren't part of Cyberpunk's comeback or Phantom Liberty's creation. It's certain that whoever is at CDPR right now is capable of greatness regardless of if they worked on W3 or not.
Ok, before we look at the list, I wanted to preface this by saying this narrative doesn't even make sense. Not every developer that left was perfect, and not every developer that joined is terrible. The gaming industry has some of the highest turnover rates; the chance that your favorite franchise is made by the same people is very slim. As you will see in the list, not many people that worked on W1/2 also worked on W3. What matters the most is good work flow, a clear vision with a plan, and enough time and resources to achieve that vision.
Some examples of this:
Our beloved Pawel Sasko joined CDPR after Witcher 2 was released and went on to create some of the greatest quests, including the Bloody Baron, the Spoon Collector, the Battle of Kaer Morhen, the wedding in HoS, etc.
Some of the new devs also worked on titles like GTAV and RDR2 before joining. The new combat designer came from the Metal Gear Rising/Horizon series.
On the flipside, Konrad Tomaskiewicz, the W3 game director, was accused of bullying before he left; he apologized afterward and said he would better himself, he then took an extended break.
THIS IS A RUMOR: I've also heard that the leadership during Cyberpunk's development was terrible, so a bunch of leadership positions being replaced might be a good thing. LegacyKillaHD did also say this for how much it's worth, I just don't know how credible he really is. He seems much better than the people spreading blatant misinformation, that's certain.
Fun Fact: There are more W3 devs working on W4 than there were W1/2 devs working on W3.
Fun Fact 2: There's a thread from 10 years ago worried about people from W1 leaving, just before CDPR dropped a masterpiece.
https://www.reddit.com/r/witcher/comments/32czqj/image_of_the_witcher_1_team_in_poland_after_the/
Anyways, here are 128 developers that worked on previous Witcher titles and Phantom Liberty. I've even added some devs that didn't work on PL, because they were occupied with W4 since the very beginning, such as Phillip Weber, the current narrative director.
Witcher 3 Maciej Włordarkiewicz
Witcher 1/2/3 Paweł Mielniczuk
Witcher 2/3 Igor Sarzyński
Witcher 3 Paweł Sasko
Witcher 3 Tomasz Marchewka
Witcher 2/3 Mikołaj Jastrzębski-Szwed
Witcher 1/2/3 Borys Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz
Witcher 3 Marcin Przybyłowicz
Witcher 3 Paweł Błasiak
Witcher 3 Olek Lebiedowicz
Witcher 3 Monika Janowska
Witcher 3 Urszula Kominek
Witcher 1/2/3 Marcin Blacha
Witcher 3 Paweł Ciemniewski
Witcher 3 Aleksandra Motyka
Witcher 3 Magdalena Zych
Witcher 3 Błażej Augustynek
Witcher 3 Sarah Grümmer
Witcher 2/3 Danisz Markiewicz
Witcher 1/2/3 Joanna Radomska
Witcher 3 Patrick K. Mills
Witcher 3 Przemysław Sawicki
Witcher 3 Jakub Skoneczny
Witcher 3 Arnold Haponik
Witcher 3 Maciej Nakonieczny
Witcher 3 Zuzanna Czerniakowska
Witcher 3 Andrzej Stopa
Witcher 3 Bartosz Nowak
Witcher 3 Paweł Ochocki
Witcher 3 Michał Zbrzeżniak
Witcher 3 Filip Downar
Witcher 3 Dzmitry Ananchuk
Witcher 3 Martyna Lipińska
Witcher 3 Wojciech Mincewicz
Witcher 3 Vladimír Vilimovský
Witcher 3 Adam Blumert
Witcher 3 Yaroslav Getsevich
Witcher 3 Maciej Znosko
Witcher 1/2/3 Jakub Knapik
Witcher 3 Charles Tremblay-Corbeil
Witcher 2/3 David Block
Witcher 3 Adrian Dąbrowski
Witcher 3 Adam Dutkiewicz
Witcher 3 Jarosław Bączyk
Witcher 3 Dmytro Kulykov
Witcher 3 Marcin Kulikowski
Witcher 2/3 Jakub Kutrzuba
Witcher 3 Natalia Kultys
Witcher 3 Artur Kepen
Witcher 3 Sebastian McBride
Witcher 3 Miles Tost
Witcher 2/3 Przemysław Czatrowski
Witcher 3 Tim Green
Witcher 3 Szymon Iwański
Witcher 3 Michał Krupa
Witcher 2/3 Tomasz Kurgan
Witcher 3 Adriana Pawłowska
Witcher 1/2/3 Karol Kowalczyk
Witcher 3 Adam Wrotek
Witcher 3 Jowita Hącia
Witcher 2/3 Artur Bielenica
Witcher 3 Miloš Domuz
Witcher 3 Joanna Iwan
Witcher 3 Aneta Pasławska
Witcher 3 Weronika Rajszys
Witcher 3 Alexandros Miaris
Witcher 3 Adam Sajkowski
Witcher 2/3 Łukasz Zawłocki
Witcher 3 Tomasz Kowalczyk
Witcher 2/3 Mateusz Popławski
Witcher 3 Maciej Ciesielski
Witcher 3 Krzysztof Jędrzejek
Witcher 3 Mateusz Kruczała
Witcher 3 Jakub Madeła
Witcher 3 Łukasz Salabura
Witcher 3 Lea Anna Leonowicz
Witcher 2/3 Monika Zawistowska
Witcher 3 Grzegorz Magiera
Witcher 2/3 Grzegorz Chojnacki
Witcher 2/3 Tomasz Stryjewski
Witcher 3 Maciej Pączkowski
Witcher 3 Maciej Fronczak
Witcher 2/3 Sebastian Nowak
Witcher 3 Francisco Javier Pintor Gallardo
Witcher 3 Krzysztof Kornatka
Witcher 3 Simon Besombes
Witcher 2/3 Arkadiusz Duch
Witcher 2/3 Michał Lemiesz
Witcher 3 Racibor Kempa
Witcher 3 Maciej Caputa
Witcher 2/3 Piotr Suchodolski
Witcher 3 Łukasz Krawczyk
Witcher 2/3 Paweł Kwiatek
Witcher 3 Konrad Ziomek
Witcher 3 David Yablonsky
Witcher 2/3 Bartosz Czechowski
Witcher 2/3 Marcin Stępień
Witcher 2/3 Paweł Daudzward
Witcher 3 Colin Walder
Witcher 3 Alexander Radkevich
Witcher 3 David Trieu
Witcher 2/3 Marcin Majewski
Witcher 3 Monika Rokita
Witcher 3 Tomasz Herbrich
Witcher 3 Andrzej Marut
Witcher 3 Paweł Sikorski
Witcher 3 Romuald Juchonowicz-Bierbasz
Witcher 3 John Schneiderman
Witcher 3 Marcin Jefimow
Witcher 1/2/3 Przemysław Wójcik
Witcher 3 Bill Daly
Witcher 3 Monika Kunicka
Witcher 2/3 Krzysztof Ostrowski
Witcher 3 Rafał Smoleń
Witcher 3 Jan Rosner
Witcher 2/3 Mateusz Sykuła
Witcher 1/2/3 Marcin Batylda
Witcher 3 Sebastian Kalemba
Witcher 1/2/3 Michał Buczkowski
Witcher 3 Mark Foreman
Witcher 1/2/3 Krzysztof Krzyścin
Witcher 3 Tetyana Meleshchenko
Witcher 1/2/3 Jędrzej Mróz
Witcher 3 Michał Stec
Witcher 1/2/3 Lucjan Więcek
Witcher 3 Phillip Weber
Witcher 3 Michał Zbrzeźniak
Witcher 3 Kajetan Kapuściński
Next fake narrative is that CDPR was "forced" to switch to Unreal Engine 5, because again, "All developers left," and Red Engine was "much better."
This isn't true, first of all, the Red Engine is generally buggy. we all know that, we've played Witcher and Cyberpunk.
Secondly, the main reason for the switch is that Red Engine was rebuilt for each new game to support the required technologies and tools. CDPR is now working on multiple different projects simultaneously. Cyberpunk, Witcher, Hadar, Sirius, etc. All of them need different things—multiplayer, lighting, streaming, etc. So developing a new engine tailored to a single game doesn't work anymore. This was confirmed by Vice President of Technology Charles Tremblay, who said the following in a recent interview:
"The first thing I want to say again, to be sure, 100 percent clear, is that the whole team, myself included, are extremely proud of the engine we built for Cyberpunk. So it is not about, 'This is so bad that we need to switch' and, you know, 'Kill me now' - that is not true. That is not true, and this is not why the decision was made to switch."
"The way we built stuff in the past was very one-sided, like one project at a time. We pushed the limit - but also we saw that if we wanted to have a multi-project at the same time, building in parallel, sharing technology together, it is not easy,"
RE also led to major problems during Cyberpunk's development, as Jason Schreier reported years ago.
Quote from the article:
"Another indication of how CD Projekt stretched things too far was that it tried to develop the engine technology behind Cyberpunk 2077, most of which was brand new, simultaneously with the game, which slowed down production. One member of the team compared the process to trying to drive a train while the tracks are being laid in front of you at the same time. It might have gone more smoothly if the track-layers had a few months head start."
UE5 fixes all those issues immediately, on top of that, it's way easier to hire new staff, which comes in handy since CDPR is expanding to North America to develop Cyberpunk Orion. UE5 isn't perfect, of course, there are some performance problems, but CDPR knew that from the start and heavily modified the engine to remove those obstacles. They've built their own custom "TurboTech", which basically fixes all performance problems UE5 currently has.
Senior Core Engineer Jaroslaw Rudkzi's presentation about TurboTech and how CDPR uses UE5:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaCf2Qmvy18
The last piece of misinformation I will address is the biggest one. People like to throw a certain word around that starts with W, and they say games under certain policies or companies with certain investors will be driven by real-world agendas and that all games that do so fail because they're bad due to those "influences." They will literally invent a reason to say xyz game checks those boxes, and they will just move to the next thing to hate on if it doesn't work out.
They'll use games like Concord to "prove" they're right but ignore great games like Alan Wake 2, Spiderman 2, God of War Ragnarok, Indiana Jones, Baldur's Gate 3, and, most importantly, Phantom Liberty when it proves them wrong. All those games were under those "evil influences" and displayed authentic worlds, characters, etc.
There's no rhyme or reason or any consistent logic whatsoever; if it fails, it's "W," and if it succeeds, it's not. The policies they're talking about are literally there for better workplace conditions, and if you read/listen to CDPR's approach specifically on their official YouTube or website, you'll know that there isn't anything bad about them.
If you're interested in how CDPR integrates culture in their games, you can listen to Kacper Niepokólczycki
https://www.youtube.com/live/j3yBs39wUHk?t=27674s
Personally, I'm extremely optimistic about Witcher 4, and I'm going to explain why.
CDPR has positively transformed in recent years and seemingly eliminated every problem that has caused issues in the past.
Thanks to UE5 and the solid foundation it provides, they can spend more time during pre-production (planning phase), giving them time to construct a vision of what the game is supposed to be with all core mechanics tested and ready to be used.
"We can also help them to achieve their vision, to do open world game[s], and also they can help us too, from some technical perspectives, on some of the aspects that we would like them [to] and that we would like to not have to be focusing on too much - because in the end, we are game company, right? In other words, it's a decision made with the intention of getting more of CDPR's developers working on the games themselves." - Charles Tremblay on working with Epic
Game Director Sebastian Kalemba and CEO Michal Nowakowski talked about the benefits as well recently.
SK on: https://youtu.be/Sixn4mRqB8Q?feature=shared&t=417
MN: https://www.youtube.com/live/H6pJrtfZoxY?feature=shared&t=1430
This is also called a "vertical slice." CDPR revealed something similar to the public in 2018 for Cyberpunk, the infamous 2018 50-min demo, with the difference that mechanics like wall running weren't tested enough and ended up on the chopping block.
An additional step they started to incorporate is testing for consoles from the beginning. Cyberpunk was notorious for having to scale back systems due to not working on weaker hardware.
"a good example would be like, console [builds] not working. So having the console working super late, it's unacceptable anymore, and it's part of our process. So we do the reviews on console, so we know exactly where we are on all the platforms - the lower platforms we have - rather than, you know, 'Oh PC is fine, so we can go forward'. So we changed this approach to have a broader visibility on the other platforms we want to have." - Charles Tremblay
Another improvement they made even before Phantom Liberty was constructing strike teams to work more efficiently. To spare me a needlessly long explanation, here's Luke Stephens explaining a simplified version:
https://youtu.be/_rrQeVX677U?feature=shared&t=27
Last few points: I need to bring this thread to an end.
- CDPR never had a stable team before that knew how to work with each other, they were always hiring heavily during development and teaching new people. The Witcher 3 grew from 150 to 350 developers, and Cyberpunk grew from 350 to 500. The current team of 400+ already reached its target size, and the vast majority worked together on Phantom Liberty and Cyberpunk fixes.
- Cyberpunk was uncharted territory for them, and they had to learn a new universe from scratch pretty much. The Witcher universe is familiar to them, it's their bread and butter. As you can see by the names, most of the team is Polish as well, so if it wasn't obvious enough by the trailer, they will absolutely nail the Slavic-inspired look and details. There are also a lot of devs that joined post W3 and worked on Thronebreaker that I didn't list.
- They've changed their approach to marketing, releasing much closer to launch and only when they're confident in delivering on what they show. Part of the reason for Cyberpunk's unfinished state was gathering too much hype before the game was ready, putting themselves into a position of immense pressure from investors to release early.
The studio "learned a lot of good practices from that experience: so announce the date when you're like really, really sure of it. And now I think we have much better tools to be sure of that date, which we - on a smaller scale - proved to ourselves with Phantom Liberty." While that campaign lasted around six months, given it was only an expansion, Nowakowski added that "for a new game, we would still expect a slightly longer - but not two-year - lasting campaign." - Michal Nowakowski
Closing Message to the Real Ones
Ignore hateful comments and the false narratives. Downvote them, don't make posts giving them power, and do your best to minimize their impact. All they want is to make everything about their problems. Fortunately, the Witcher fandom is big enough to overshadow it. Others are not so lucky. Let's keep the discourse about the game and be happy that we'll get another entry in one of our favorite franchises. Once Witcher 4 is released and it's a success, the haters will shift their narrative and move to the next thing as they always do, and we will enjoy the game.
Thank you for reading :)