The team is looking to AI-driven solutions to improve how players interact with the worlds of The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2.
We are still a long way from The Witcher 4. CD Projekt’s next RPG does not even have a release date yet, and the studio has shown little beyond a tech demo that mainly highlighted its approach to Unreal Engine 5. Even so, much of what is happening under the hood remains unclear, though there is now at least a little more light on the subject: according to the company’s latest annual report, the studio is developing AI-based tools that could help generate settlements, cities, and NPC populations in a more realistic way.
Although CD Projekt has shown little interest in generative AI as a creative resource, the studio does have a specialized team that has spent years researching how these support technologies can be applied – in this case, to make the game world function and react more believably. The full picture is still unknown, but the report states that the research team has worked on automation, prototyping, testing, and generating realistic NPC crowds through machine learning. The idea is not to replace human labor – since NPCs, along with their routines, models, voices, and other elements, will still be handcrafted – but to optimize production processes, enrich the player experience, and improve interaction with the environment in a large open world.
One of the more obvious possibilities being explored is the creation of realistic behavior for large numbers of NPCs, something that games such as the Assassin’s Creed series have attempted before. One of the best-known examples remains Unity, which was able to fill the streets of Paris with 12,000 NPCs. It is also the kind of scale the franchise has never really managed to reproduce since.
According to the report, some of these initiatives have already progressed into testing and early implementation, although it remains unclear how much of that work will end up in The Witcher 4, or whether CD Projekt is saving its strongest solutions for Cyberpunk 2 instead. For now, development on Ciri’s RPG is still focused on laying down solid technological and narrative foundations, which means it will likely be years before we see something truly coherent and impressive at the gameplay level.
