First trailer for The Witcher 4 reveals you'll play as Princess Ciri

In 2015, CD Projekt Red released The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, an open world game where you played as professional monster hunter Geralt of Rivia, who explored a vast fantasy continent and killed a lot of the vicious demonic fauna that lived there. CD Projekt Red had already been making Witcher games for years, but this was the first to really catch on. It led to an explosion in popularity for the original Witcher books by Andrzej Sapkowski and inspired Netflix to create its own Witcher TV show, which starred Henry Cavill as Geralt (to be replaced by Liam Hemsworth in the upcoming fourth season).

Now, a decade later, CD Projekt Red is back with The Witcher IV, where you'll go on a whole new adventure. This time around, you'll be playing as Ciri, Geralt's adoptive daughter and protégé from the earlier games (and the books, and the TV series). The Witcher games are set after the ending of the books, so at this point in their timeline Ciri is a full-fledged witcher traveling the Continent and hunting monsters on her own. In the first trailer for the game (which is a cinematic trailer, meaning this isn't how it will look when you actually play it), Ciri fights a monster called a Bauk, just in time to save a villager named Mioni from being sacrificed to it. Watch below:

We can see that Ciri has undergone some changes since we last saw her in The Witcher 3. She can drink witcher potions without being harmed as a normal human would — instead her senses are heightened, giving her an edge in combat — and she bears the distinct cat-like eyes of the witcher. So sometime between the end of the last game and the start of this one, she's undergone the brutal trial of the grasses, which turns ordinary humans into monster-fighting mutants...if they survive.

“That was a huge thing for us, to make that call [to mutate Ciri], not only for her, but for the game,” executive producer Małgorzata Mitręga told IGN. “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.”

You also might notice that, during her fight with the Bauk, Ciri draws energy from a pool of water and turns in into an electrical attack. In other words, she uses magic, something Ciri also taps into in the books and the TV show. This goes beyond the simple "signs" that Geralt could use, and will be a new gameplay element. “Ciri is not only mutated, she's a source, a powerful source. So she's a special being,” said game director Sebastian Kalemba. “The mutated source means that's kind of connecting two worlds, the witcher world and the sorcerer world.”

Another fun detail is Ciri's sword, which fans may recognize as Zireael, a sword that is given to Ciri in one of the endings to Witcher 3. With all this continuity from the previous games, it makes you wonder where Geralt is at, but they can't reveal everything in the first trailer.

The Witcher 4: Neutral no more

So Ciri will play a bit differently than Geralt, even though they'll have things in common. Players will also get to explore new areas, although Kalemba is loathe to reveal details: "[W]e 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.”

Another way Ciri is very different from Geralt is that while the taciturn elder witcher famously tried to remain neutral when it came to his work, Ciri very clearly has an opinion on the willingness of these villagers to sacrifice Mioni to the Bauk. “She doesn't want to stay neutral,” Kalemba said. “She's way younger. She's still defining her own code and she's less pragmatic.”

The world of The Witcher is very dark. Ciri gets a lesson in just how grim things are when she returns from killing the Bauk to find that the villagers killed Mioni anyway, since that's their tradition. “These people at some point will notice that change will come, because the [Bauk’s] fog will never be here ever again,” Kalemba said. “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 offered. “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.”

It sounds like a fun, morally ambiguous time. There's no release date set for The Witcher 4 as of yet, but given that we still haven't seen gameplay, I wouldn't expect it before late 2025 or 2026 at the earliest.

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