What is The Witcher IV?
The Witcher IV opens a brand-new saga in CD PROJEKT RED’s dark-fantasy setting, and this time the story belongs to Ciri. She isn’t a trainee being taught the trade — she’s a working professional monster slayer who already knows exactly how ugly this world can get. It’s a single-player, open-world RPG with no co-op and no live-service grind, heading to Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 and PC. No age rating has been announced yet.
Getting started
Your first instinct will be to sprint down the main quest. Resist it. Open-world RPGs at this scale reward players who stay in the opening region long enough to learn its systems, its factions and its map. Do the small contracts and side quests first: that’s usually where a game teaches you combat timing, resource management and the weight of dialogue choices without punishing you too hard for mistakes.
Before you commit to a build, spend a few hours playing a balanced style — melee, preparation and the tools the game gives you for tracking monsters. Shifting your setup later is usually more expensive than simply not over-committing early.
Decide your difficulty honestly, too. If you’re here for the story, play lower and don’t apologise for it. If you want the tension of a real hunt, go higher and accept that some fights will kill you repeatedly.
Tips for beginners
- Save manually and often. Use several save slots and rotate them. Autosaves won’t rescue you from a decision you regret twenty hours later.
- Read the bestiary and quest notes. In a monster-hunting RPG, information is a weapon. Knowing what you’re walking into is half the fight.
- Do side content before it expires. Contracts and side quests often change or disappear once the main story moves on — and they carry some of the best writing.
- Don’t hoard consumables. Potions, bombs and oils exist to be used. Finishing the game with a full inventory isn’t an achievement.
- Loot with a filter. Take crafting materials and gear you’ll actually wear; sell or dismantle the rest. Carry weight and merchant gold are tighter than you expect.
- Talk to everyone and listen. Dialogue choices here have long tails. A line you forget early can decide who survives much later.
- Learn to retreat. Backing off, healing up and returning better prepared is a legitimate strategy, not a failure.
Is it worth playing?
If you like single-player, story-driven open-world RPGs and you don’t need multiplayer to stay interested, The Witcher IV belongs on your list. Ciri is a genuinely interesting lead — an established professional rather than another chosen-one beginner — and CD PROJEKT RED has proven it can build worlds worth exploring for a hundred hours.
The honest caveat: this is a new saga from a studio whose games are famous for arriving ambitious and rough. If you’re not desperate to play at launch, waiting a few weeks for reviews, patch notes and performance reports costs you nothing and usually buys a better first playthrough. If you are desperate, that’s fine too — just keep those manual saves coming.