If there’s any RPG that has actually pushed the genre forward this generation, it’s undoubtedly Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. The realistic open-world medieval RPG is incredibly immersive with satisfying gameplay and some brilliant quests, and it even has a new expansion on the way.
As it turns out, one of the brains behind that game’s magnificent gameplay had departed from Warhorse Studios to join The Witcher 4 team over at CD Project Red. Announced in a new LinkedIn update spotted by GamesRadar, KC:D2’s lead gameplay designer Karel Kolmann is now working on the Polish studio’s upcoming RPG.
Kolmann has confirmed that he is now working on The Witcher 4 as a senior quest designer following his work on Warhorse’s masterpiece. During his time at Warhorse Studios, which he joined in 2017, Kolmann wrote a number of quests and designed the game’s hardcore mode.
“I owned several quests and gameplay features and worked on them as a writer, designer and scripter,” the developer said on LinkedIn, explaining that he designed 11 quests including dialogue and cutscene writing, and scripting for two of them.
Additionally, Kolmann’s work on the RPG involved designing and writing the game’s crime system which determines how “NPCs react to all player actionsin our open world setting”, designed and balanced the game’s stealth and perception systems, and also designed large-scale battles and combat.
At the time of writing, very little is known about the overarching plot and gameplay of The Witcher 4 other than the fact that it features Ciri as the primary protagonist and that Geralt will be present in some form. Unlike prior games in the series, the new game will be developed with Unreal Engine 5 instead of CDPR’s in-house RED Engine.
CD Projekt Red first showed footage of its next game in June of this year, but the studio has explained that the target footage wasn’t real gameplay. Instead, the tech demo using Unreal Engine 5 was designed to be a “technological showcase set in the world of Witcher 4”.
“It showcases the powerful foundation we’re building in close collaboration with Epic Games to push open-world design further than ever before and the core systems and features we’re developing using Unreal Engine 5,” the studio told VGC.
The tech demo in the world of The Witcher 4 showed base PlayStation 5 hardware running a dense environment with ray-tracing enabled at 60fps, including intensive technology such as nanite. However, it’s not known if the actual game will be targeting the same visuals on base PS5.
