Making The Witcher 4’s reveal trailer took a speech Geralt might have given, 14 days of actors fighting pipes, and three days with a real flower hat-wearer running around a forest

If you’d been wondering what went into putting together The Witcher 4’s reveal trailer from last year’s iteration of The Game Awards, then today’s your lucky day. CD Projekt’s put out a behind-the-scenes video delving into how it did just that.

While there are some soundbites that’ll be familiar to you if you’ve been keeping track of what the various devs and folks involved with the game have been saying since that first trailer arrived, the video still has plenty of interesting nuggets.

As explained by various Witcher devs and staff from Platige Image – a Polish production studio specialising in stuff like visual effects that CDPR worked on the trailer with – it took a lot of effort to pull together. There were 14 days worth of mo-cap sessions, with actors doing stuff like battling a manoeuvrable pipe structure designed to simulate the monster Ciri battles – a Bauk.

There were also three days of real-world filming designed to help the team test different lenses they wanted to then re-create digitally and nail the movie-esque look they were going for. “Distortions, lens flares, bloom, [and] how the Bauk’s head behaves” are the kind of thing mentioned as having been captured, but judging by the video itself, there were also shots of a woman running around a real forest wearing a garland of flowers on her head like Mioni – the girl the villagers are trying to sacrifice – does in the trailer.

One other interesting detail concerns the monologue given by Mioni’s father at the start of the trailer, and confirms something you probably picked up when you first watched it – basically, the idea was that as part of the symbolic parallels between Ciri and Mioni’s fates as young women being given the destiny of trying to save folks, this speech matches both characters.

“It was actually really important for us to actually write this monologue in a way that Geralt could have said that about Ciri as well,” narrative director Philipp Weber explained. So, at least if Gerry ever has to attend her wedding, he can relax knowing his speech is all sorted, and dedicate all his energy to moaning about having to wear a doublet.

In other recent CD Projekt-related news, a job listing for Cyberpunk 2077’s sequel recently hinted that the studio’s potentially aiming to deliver “the most realistic and reactive crowd system in any game to date”, though reading into job descriptions rarely paints the full picture of what a game might actually end up like.