The Witcher 4 has finally been revealed, and with that announcement comes a stunning trailer that follows new series protagonist Ciri on a dangerous quest. Pre-rendered in a custom build of Unreal Engine 5, it’s certainly a spectacle to behold, but behind those handsome looks and thick mist, there’s a lot to get stuck into. So, we spoke to The Witcher 4’s game director and executive producer to uncover and explain the many incredible details featured in the cinematic. From monsters, to music, to medallions, here are 12 important details in The Witcher 4 reveal trailer explained by CD Projekt Red itself.
1. People Hate Witchers
“We’ve always said that this world doesn’t need a hero, it needs a professional”, states The Witcher 4’s game director, Sebastian Kalemba. And, indeed, there is no room or want for heroes in the Northern Kingdoms. Professional monster hunters, known as witchers, may solve the population’s problems, but not without being feared themselves. This is shown in the way the trailer’s villagers look upon The Witcher 4’s new cloaked protagonist with distrust and disgust.
“People, especially at the ends of civilization, they’ve probably seen a witcher maybe twice in their life”, Kalemba continues. “They’ve heard rumors, they’ve heard stories that they are monsters because they deal with monsters. So that’s why they are in fear. But actually they bring good, they bring help and support.[The moment the villagers see the witcher for the first time is] a very important moment because we finally reveal who’s the protagonist for the new saga.”
2. A Brand New Protagonist
That new lead character is Ciri, the adopted daughter of previous protagonist, Geralt of Rivia. Several years have passed since the events of The Witcher 3, and it’s now Ciri’s turn to take on the role of witcher and the skills and burden that come with such a title. We see her armour, both steel and silver swords, and medallion. But, crucially, we also get to see her new cat-like eyes: a clear sign that she has undergone the legendary Trial of the Grasses – a painful right of passage for any graduating witcher that mutates the participant’s body into something more than human.
“That was a huge thing for us, to make that call [to mutate Ciri], not only for her, but for the game,” explains Małgorzata Mitręga, The Witcher 4’s executive producer. “But then it’s so important and still leaves so much space for imagination, like when it happened, how it happened. It’s just a tease showing something, but you don’t know where you will experience it and how in the game. I think it’s a huge change and I hope people did not expect it.”
3. The Village Ritual
Ciri is seen entering a village seemingly in the midst of some form of ritual ceremony. While we get a glimpse of the ritual’s rites and procedure in the trailer’s opening moments, its dark true meaning of is only gradually revealed over time.
“At first glance, it seems that it is just the flower that is floating on top of the water,” says Kalemba of a cleansing sequence in a bathtub. “But the fun fact is that this is a very Slavic kind of flower. This is a special flower that people in the medieval era were using in special moments to defeat evil. It is very symbolic. Every single frame here is very meaningful.”
That attention to detail can also be seen in the way the trailer’s two central characters – Mioni, the young woman taking part in the ritual, and Ciri – perform preparations that reflect one another’s. As Mioni is prepared for her village ceremony, Ciri simultaneously prepares to do the violent work of a witcher by meditating and sharpening her blade.
“The motivation behind this parallel montage here is that you have the ritual. And at this stage you don’t know what this ritual is about, but you have a very professional ritual as sort of a preparation for something. And then you have a regular villager, you don’t know who she is right now, but [she’s undergoing] a parallel ritual. [There’s] more or less the same kind of motivation behind two completely different rituals, and preparation for something, which is very symbolic, too.”
“But at this point, you don’t know if it’s a bad thing, a good thing, or what is the reality,” adds Mitręga. “It might be a wedding. So it’s just teasing something’s going on, but you cannot tell if it’s something odd yet.”
Mitręga also tells us that this village is located in the far north of The Witcher’s world, but where exactly remains a mystery for now. “I think at this stage we shouldn’t say the exact location,” teases Kalemba. “So we keep this as a secret still. But yeah, we plan to let players be able to explore new lands and new regions in the world. And I can only say that there are some really epic regions to find.”
4. Ciri is Not Geralt
Geralt was famous for remaining neutral and as apolitical as possible when it came to the larger conflicts at play in the first trilogy of games. Those aren’t footsteps that Ciri necessarily wants to follow in, though. “She doesn’t want to stay neutral,” Kalemba affirms. “She’s way younger. She’s still defining her own code and she’s less pragmatic.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by Mitręga: “I think that what makes her so special as a protagonist overall, [is that] she has so many layers, and the passion and engagement of being a witcher, but she wants to be the person that is always choosing a side. There is no neutral anymore in her. So this is a new path, right? And a new experience for the player as well.”
By the mid-point of the trailer, it’s clear that while Ciri has taken on a paying job, she’s motivated more by saving Mioni from a ritual sacrifice than she is the profit. “She’s actually going to enter this cave,” explains Kalemba, talking of the cave where Mioni will be sacrificed to… something. “And that’s the point of no return. At this stage, she knows that she’s committed. ‘I go there and for sure only one character will survive.’”
“What’s amazing about her is that she’s not that well-defined”, Kalemba adds. “So we have this opportunity to let the player define her experience, this path, this journey. Since I can remember, we believed that for sure the next journey, the next saga belongs to Ciri as she’s a super wide container for emotions, for the experience, for the journey.”
5. The Bauk
If there’s anything guaranteed to be found along that journey, it’s monsters. A witcher is nothing without a bounty to hunt, after all. And in the trailer we get a look at an intimidating new foe.
“His name is Bauk”, says Kalemba. “He has this ability to smell your fear, to be able to play with your traumas, to paralyze you. So that you finally become easy prey, an easy meal.
“A fun fact is that when we started to develop [this trailer], the big idea was that when you see the silhouette in a fog, you want to feel or at least think that it’s a very old granny sort of character that is in a hooded coat,” Kalemba explains. “Then he unfolds to [reveal] the big monster.
“We wanted to have a creature that is able to be very heavy and strong, but at the same agile,” he adds. “So the Bauk is able to also use all kinds of surfaces to explore and to run. We wanted to push the entire monster design for the project.”
The Bauk’s visual design was crafted with a very specific emotional effect in mind. “What emotion do we want to have with the player with the monster?” says Mitręga. “How can we include it in the visuals and the way it feels and you fight? It’s all connected, right? So [there’s] a lot of ingredients to create the beast.”
This fascinating new creature has its roots in Serbian mythology, but it isn’t just European folk tales that The Witcher’s horrors emerge from. CD Projekt Red has taken inspiration from a world a million miles and several hundred years away: Cyberpunk 2077’s Night CIty. Kalemba notes that the studio’s work on Phantom Liberty’s Chimera tank boss fight in particular was a good touchstone on the path to building bigger, better monsters.
“This is a never-ending learning curve”, he states. “It is an evolution of everything we’ve created so far. We try to raise the bar with every next title. And absolutely, the Chimera was a very, very good lesson on our path when it comes to designing big creatures. In this case, of course, we have an organic monster, but still, [we learned] some lessons when it comes to the way we want to let players ultimately defeat it. It’s something that we have definitely been inspired by.”
6. The Silver Sword
Speaking of defeating creatures, Ciri does exactly that in the trailer – taking down the Bauk with the aid of a few familiar Witcher tricks and tools.
The first part of a witcher’s kit we see in the trailer is arguably the most important: a sword. “It is a silver sword at this stage,” Kalemba confirms. Silver swords are, of course, vital for monster hunting because many enemy creatures are vulnerable to silver.
Ahead of her battle with the Bauk we see Ciri sharpening her own silver sword. And, if your playthrough of The Witcher 3 ended with Ciri becoming a witcher, then you’ll likely recognise this particular blade. “I believe that some people will already spot that it’s most probably Zireael,” says Kalemba. The sword was a gift from Geralt, and it is said that no witcher has, or ever had, a better weapon.
7. The Potion
A sword alone will not be enough to defeat the Bauk, though. And so we see Ciri make use of another important witcher item before she makes her first strike.
“So she’s drinking the poison,” Kalemba explains. “Witcher potions are poison; this is how it works in this world. A regular human being would definitely die, but Ciri as a mutant is able to not only survive but build an advantage because of this potion. She’s deadly focused, has tunnel vision, and [hears] no more voices [because the potion helps her block out the Bauk’s whispers]. She’s even able to see better in the fog. And she’s able to finally recognize the silhouette of the monster and go full force with an attack.”
“That’s also a special moment because most probably nobody has seen a Bauk that close, ever,” he adds.
8. The Magic
There are many, many differences between Geralt and Ciri, but when it comes to combat the key thing that separates the two witchers is magic. While Geralt is able to cast some very basic spells, known as “signs”, Ciri is able to command the power of sorcery. We saw a little of her power in action during the segments of The Witcher 3 in which we play as Ciri, as she was able to teleport around enemies to avoid damage. But this trailer showcases an even greater aptitude for magic than we’ve seen from Ciri before.
“Ciri is not only mutated, she’s a source, a powerful source. So she’s a special being,” Kalemba reveals. “The mutated source means that’s kind of connecting two worlds, the witcher world and the sorcerer world.”
During the trailer we see Ciri draw energy from the cave’s water and turn it into an electrified blast. “She’s able to drain the source, the stream that is next to her, and catalyze it in a powerful spell, in this case, the bolt.”
9. The Witcher 1 Homage
This trailer features a fun callback for long-time veterans of the series. The last moments of the fight echo the original Witcher game’s opening cinematic, in which Geralt does battle with a Striga and takes it down with a silver chain. Ciri uses a very similar technique here to take down the Bauk, but does so in a supercharged way that’s all her own.
“You remember [Geralt] fighting with a Striga?”, Kalemba enquires. “In this case, she’s not only using [a silver chain] but also enchanting it to make it more powerful. It is a utility tool to shorten the distance to deliver a final blow.”
10. A New Composer for a New Saga
The whole six-minute trailer is soundtracked by a new composer for The Witcher series, as Cyberpunk 2077’s senior composer picks up the baton.
“The master maestro behind the tune is our composer, P.T. Adamczyk,” Kalemba reveals. “He was tailoring the tune in a way that you have this music arc purely connected to what we want the audience to feel in this specific moment.
”There is this moment when the women’s voices are actually getting louder,” he continues. “This is the moment of breakthrough. So the moment that she’s finally just about to defeat the monster. The title of [the track] is No Gods Only Monsters.”
11. There Are No Gods Here, Only Monsters
Speaking of no gods, only monsters, let’s jump to the final line of the trailer, in which Ciri says those exact words. But what do they mean in the context of this story?
“We wanted to kind of leave room for interpretation,” Kalemba explains. “You don’t know what she is about to do. But the way she delivers it, you know that there are no gods here in this forest. There was only a monster. And it is that simple. But these people, they’re driven by superstitions. So they don’t believe her. She can show them a chopped-head trophy and they will still follow the bloody old paths. But it’s also symbolic when it comes to the overall profession of a witcher.”
“It’s kind of like, who is the monster?”, Mitręga adds. “For her, [it’s about] being this hope in all of that. Still with this passion, even though the world is very dark, you can still fight for it.”
12. The Choice and the Consequence
The Witcher’s is a dark world indeed. That much is clear in the seemingly inescapable demise of the young woman, Mioni, at the hands of the villagers. Ciri may have chosen to do what she thought was the right thing, but she didn’t foresee the bloody consequences of her actions. It’s entirely representative of the sort of choice and consequence-centered quest design that CDPR has become known for.
“What I love about this world is that it’s dark and it’s grim, but there is always this shade of hope, the warmth,” says Kalemba. “As you know, the way we make games [is] all about choices and consequences. But in this case, Ciri is simply super disappointed again with humans, right? Humans are, simply in this case, in this village, incapable of change. These people are driven by some superstitions, some bloody tradition that they established, because what helped them establish this is just simply fear.”
As previously mentioned, while Ciri arrives in the village to perform a paying job, it’s clear that she’s really there to save a life. And while she does save Mioni from being eaten by the Bauk, the villagers are unhappy that their sacrifice still lives – a sacrifice they believe keeps them safe from evil. And so they do the grisly work themselves.
“So I don’t know exactly what happened in the meantime [after Ciri sends Mioni back to the village], but you can imagine that her father is beaten, he was about to defend her,” he theorises. “Sadly, he couldn’t manage. And as you see here, the outcome is that it’s also a very good lesson for Ciri herself, that she’s not able to take full control over everything. She’s not able to be responsible for everything and everyone. She can try, but life is life.
“These people at some point will notice that change will come, because the [Bauk’s] fog will never be here ever again,” he continues. “That needs to last years for people to be able to experience it. And probably there’s going to be a folk story about the witcher with the grey hair that, years ago, came here and defeated the monster so we can live our life the way we live.”
‘It is just not a hero story, even though she wants to be. The world doesn’t work like that,” Mitręga explains. “So the lessons are hard, but then again, as a player, you can always make a choice. And then in the previous game, it’s never black and white. You don’t know about the consequences or how it affects the world. And of course, this is a part that we want to embrace a lot [for The Witcher 4] as well.”
So, Ciri is leading a new Witcher saga, and from this six-minute trailer alone, we can tell she’ll have both tough monsters to take down, and tough choices to make along her journey. For more on The Witcher 4, check out our in-depth look into everything we’ve learned about CD Projekt Red’s next RPG, and our lore primer made with the studio’s experts to help get you set for the new saga.
