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CD PROJEKT RED is steering clear of fetch quests in The Witcher 4, and I'm glad.
Video game design has come a long, long way since the industry started to take off in the 1970s, but few genres have grown as much as RPGs have. The simplistic, rudimentary design philosophies of yesteryear eventually gave way to far more depth and complexity, resulting in roleplaying experiences with larger, denser worlds, richer stories, and a wider variety of encounter solutions to support player creativity and freedom.
Despite this, a few irksome and tired trends still remain — one of which is the prevalence of fetch quests. These simple missions task the player with retrieving one or more items and then delivering them to the quest giver or another NPC, and in most cases, they're incredibly dull busywork jobs with little-to-no story or roleplaying relevance.
It's relieving to hear, then, that developer CD PROJEKT RED is adhering to a no fetch quest policy with its highly anticipated RPG sequel The Witcher 4.
Narrative director Philipp Weber said as much in an interview with GamesRadar+. "A quest has to be something interesting. I have to feel, as a player, that if I played that quest, my time was well spent and not just spent," he explained. "I was busy doing stuff, and didn't think about work or taxes. I experienced a story, or something else that was worth it. That basic rule is still there 100%."
An official The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt screenshot showing off next-gen upgrades made to the RPG's visuals.
(Image credit: CD Projekt RED)
That "rule" has actually been a core part of CD PROJEKT RED's RPG quest design for a long time now, with the studio following the policy with 2015's award-winning The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and applying it to 2020's Cyberpunk 2077 as well. I have my issues with both games — I found The Witcher 3's combat to be quite shallow, and Cyberpunk's open world was far less engaging to explore than what the developer's marketed it as — but the studio's approach to quests has always been a big bright spot.
Indeed, both The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 were praised near-unanimously for their lack of fetch quests, and in the rare event you ran into one, they were always attached to an interesting side character or an intriguing scenario. Beyond those, quests were even more thoroughly engaging and creative, with deceptively simple premises that often gave way to genuinely surprising twists, complex situations, and thought-provoking choices.
Quests like these are the ones your brain tends to chew on long after you complete them, and their abundance in CD PROJEKT RED's games is what drives fans to replay them long after their release. Writing them undoubtedly takes an immense amount of effort — Weber said designers wrote "10 times as many ideas as those that landed in the game" while brainstorming — but in the end, it pays off, and they help the developer's titles rise above much of the competition.
A screenshot of Ciri in The Witcher 4 taken from a recent Unreal Engine 5 tech demo.
(Image credit: CD Projekt RED)
I do think "radiant" fetch-style quests have their place at times; they're a good mindless activity to do when you just want to exist in a game's world and kill some time without doing anything too complex. RPGs should never be reliant on them, though, and I'm glad CD PROJEKT RED (along with other studios like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 dev Warhorse Studios) is either implementing them in extremely limited quantities or simply not at all.
The Witcher 4 doesn't have a set release date or launch window, though we know it's a long way off and isn't coming out before the end of 2026. Notably, a recent Unreal Engine 5 tech presentation of the game confirmed it will feature the Northern Kingdom of Kovir. The highly anticipated RPG is coming to Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC, and PS5.
Sadly, we're in for a long wait before we can step into Ciri's boots, but you can always play The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 to make it less painful. The Complete Edition of the former is just $13.19 at CDKeys, while the Ultimate Edition of the latter is $35.69 at CDKeys; those are both fantastic discounts, with each getting you the full game and all DLC.
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