CD PROJEKT RED (CDPR) has confirmed their plan to develop a new Witcher trilogy over the next 6 years, citing their usage of Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) as to how they will accomplish this.

4 for 4

4 years of development thus-far, the Witcher 4 is still under the knife. With this being their first title produced on UE5, CDPR have taken the time to learn the engine and really dig into what can be accomplished using it. As we know producing a reactive, living, open-world- like what was shown in their tech demo -takes a lot of time to get right. No one has forgotten the state of CDPR’s other open-world title Cyberpunk 2077 when it launched; nothing but sunshine, rainbows and floating NPCs.

Fans commenting on the tech demo reiterate this idea. Telling the developers to ‘Take their time!’, so that a true follow-on from Wild Hunt can be realized. Once the development of TW4 is complete, the other 2 games should be built much quicker. With the experience CDPR gained utilising UE5 to make TW4, coupled with (most likely) reusing assets and systems for TW5 & 6, would drastically reduce development time of newer titles. Michał Nowakowski, joint CEO at CDPR, stated that

…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, betweenTW5 and TW6 and so on.

CD PROJEKT RED’s Projects

CDPR confirmed they had 2 other projects in the oven; codenamed ‘Hadar’ and ‘Sirius’. Fool’s Theory, a close collaborator of CDPR, have been entrusted to bring TW1 to the present in a glorious remaster. Michał Nowakowski comments,

As for Hadar and Sirius – they’re in their respective stages of – for Sirius – development, and for Hadar – still, IP preproduction, if you want to call it that way. In terms of Fool’s Theory – I think we stated in the past that the majority of the team is currently involved in the other project, and also support for The Witcher 4…

While no date has been eluded to for the release of TW4, Nowakowski did confirm that the game would not be released in 2026- so the earliest we could see it is 2027.

As the old adage goes: You cannot rush greatness.