It’s been over 10 years since the launch of the excellent The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and nearly four years since the announcement of “the next installment in The Witcher series of video games.” Despite those long waits, developer CD Projekt Red is still insisting it will deliver the next three complete Witcher games in a short six-year window.
In a recent earnings call, CDPR VP of Business Development Michał Nowakowski suggested that a rapid release schedule would be enabled in no small part by the team’s transition away from its proprietary REDEngine to the popular Unreal Engine in 2022. At the time, CDPR said the transition to Unreal Engine would “elevate development predictability and efficiency, while simultaneously granting us access to cutting-edge game development tools.” Those considerations seemed especially important in the wake of widespread technical issues with the console versions of Cyberpunk 2077, which CDPR later blamed on REDEngine’s “in-game streaming system.”
“We’re happy with how [Unreal Engine] is evolving through the Epic team’s efforts, and how we are learning how to make it work within a huge open-world game, as [The Witcher 4] is meant to be,” Nowakowski said in the recent earnings call. “In a way, yes, I do believe that further games should be delivered in a shorter period of time—as we had stated before, our plan still is to launch the whole trilogy within a six-year period, so yes, that would mean we would plan to have a shorter development time between TW4 and TW5, between TW5 and TW6 and so on.”
Don’t start the clock just yet
To be clear, the “six-year period” Nowakowski is talking about here starts with the eventual release of The Witcher 4, meaning the developer plans to release two additional sequels within six years of that launch. And CDPR confirmed earlier this year that The Witcher 4 would not launch in 2026, extending the window for when we can expect all these promised new games.
CDPR had previously committed to the “three Witcher games in six years” schedule in 2022, when The Witcher 4 was in pre-production and known only as “Project Polaris.” Back then, CDPR said “150+ people” were involved in the game’s development, a number that has since grown to 447 active developers according to CDPR’s latest Earnings Report.
We got the first public glimpse of those developers’ work this summer, through an impressive The Witcher 4 tech demo shown running on a PS5 during Epic’s State of Unreal presentation. But that technical presentation was labeled as “not actual gameplay,” even during sections being ostensibly controlled live by one of CDPR’s developers.
All that work on a brand new engine underlying The Witcher 4 could make it easier for CDPR to crank out further sequels on an accelerated schedule. Still, releasing three full-sized Witcher games in a six-year period is a pretty ambitious promise, especially considering the roughly eight-year gap between the 2007 release of The Witcher and the 2015 release of The Witcher 3.
Keep in mind, too, that CDPR is concurrently working on a sequel to Cyberpunk 2077, which has grown to a 135-person development team that CDPR projects will scale up to over 300 developers by 2027. The studio is also hard at work on a multiplayer Witcher spinoff going by “Project Sirius,” a “modern reimagining” of the first The Witcher game (which has also been in the works for nearly four years now), and the still-mysterious Project Hadar to top it off. That is a lot of balls in the air for a still-growing company that had just 250 employees when The Witcher 3 launched.
It’s also worth noting that, even with a quick development schedule, technology developed today for The Witcher 4 may need significant updates in order to target new console and GPU hardware that will be standard by the time The Witcher 6 eventually launches. With Epic saying a preview of Unreal Engine 6 could be just two to three years away, we sure hope CD Projekt Red is future-proofing its ambitious development plans.
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