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.
A tech demo of The Witcher 4 from this summer shows off some impressive graphics tech.
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.
