A new Witcher game is in development at CD Projekt Red, the studio responsible for the Witcher trilogy and spinoffs such as Gwentbut details about the next entry in the fantasy video game series are scarce. But we do know the game being developed under the codename Polariswill usher in a “new saga” for the Witcher brand.
“We want to release two more Witcher games after Polaristo create a new AAA RPG trilogy,” CD Projekt Red said in 2022.
CD Projekt Red is abandoning the internal REDengine, the technology that The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings And The Witcher 3: Wild Huntand will instead use Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5. CD Projekt and Epic announced a “multi-year strategic partnership” in March 2022, and under this agreement, developers from CD Projekt Red will work with Epic “with the primary goal being to help [Unreal Engine] for open-world experiences.” Based on this language, the next Witcher game will be another open-world adventure.
CD Projekt has not yet announced a final title, gameplay details, or release date for the fourth main installment of The Witcher. We don’t know the story or the characters that will appear in it. Here’s everything we Do
The School of the Lynx
The only very visible clue CD Projekt Red has given about its new Witcher saga is an image of a medallion buried in the snow. Initially interpreted by some as a reference to the School of the Cat from The Witcher story, CD Projekt Red’s global communications director Robert Malinowski clarified that Eurogamer after the project revealed that the medallion is supposed to resemble a lynx. Admittedly, a lynx is a species within the cat family, but in The Witcher book series and games there is canonically no school of the lynx. (Geralt is, of course, a witcher from the school of the wolf.)
However, a lot of speculation points to Ciri from the Witcher series, who reclaimed a cat medallion from witcher hunter and bounty hunter Leo Bonhart (and wore it herself) and, thanks to this whole cat-lynx connection, led the new Witcher saga.
It is (probably) not an exclusive product on the Epic Games Store
CD Projekt Red and Epic Games have a “multi-year strategic partnership,” the companies said, but that doesn’t mean the next Witcher video game will be exclusive to Epic Games’ digital store. Although Epic has invested many millions to secure exclusive games for the Epic Games Store, such an agreement doesn’t seem to be in the cards for the next Witcher. Or at least CD Projekt wants to downplay the possibility of exclusivity After all, CD Projekt has its own games store, GOG.com, and has been successful across platforms over the last decade.
It’s (probably) not called The Witcher 4
Marcin Iwinski from CD Projekt Red said back in 2013: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (and its two expansions) marked the end of Geralt’s trilogy. And after the new Witcher game was announced, Radek Grabowski, CD Projekt’s global PR director, stressed on Twitter
Fans and media will likely continue to see the new game as The Witcher 4 anyway, because that’s an easy shortcut until CD Projekt Red gives us a proper title for the project. Even CDPR chief strategist Adam Kiciński said casually: described the game as The Witcher 4 in 2023 during a conference callwhich the developer later described as a “slip of the tongue”.
It’s not just “The Witcher 3 in a new guise”
At least that is what CD Projekt Red claims. In March 2024, when the new Witcher game was still in pre-production, CDPR co-CEO Michał Nowakowski said during a question and answer session on the results that the developer “tries to push new boundaries and explore new fields.”
“I think what I’m trying to say is that you shouldn’t expectThe Witcher 3 in a kind of new guise,” Nowakowski said. “Of course we’re building on what was there before and what we’ve learned, but we’re going to add new gameplay elements and new mechanics that you haven’t seen in our previous games. I would say – doing things like that is always a risk; it’s not just repeating what’s been done before.”
The new Witcher game has no release date
Given CD Projekt Red’s development history, it’s pretty safe to assume that we won’t be getting our hands on the new Witcher saga anytime soon. The last game in the series, The Witcher 3: Wild Huntbegan development in the summer of 2011, but was not officially announced until two years later. And the finished game was not delivered until May 2015. The studio’s latest game, Cyberpunk2077was first teased in 2012 and took a grueling eight years to finally arrive (and in not too good shape at that).
Suffice it to say, the next Witcher game is probably years away. Not only will CD Projekt Red take its time building up its new saga, but it will almost certainly spend extra time polishing and fixing bugs in the sequel to the Witcher trilogy, because it simply can’t repeat the mistakes it made with The Witcher. Cyberpunk2077.
Adam Badowski, joint CEO of CDPR, said: Reuters in January 2024 that the company expects to have “around 400 people working on the project by the middle of the year,” so development of the next Witcher game is definitely progressing.
What we think we know
Based on the events of The Witcher 3 and its many choice-based endings, good and bad, there’s plenty to speculate about the series’ new direction in the wake of Geralt’s story. If you want to read about the possibilities, here’s a look at where The Witcher could go Wild Hunt.
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