The Witcher remake won’t be out until sometime after The Witcher 4, and we have no idea when that will be
CD Projekt announced in October that The Witcher, the studio’s first game, will be getting a full remake (opens in new tab). Fans eager to see how Geralt’s videogame adventures got started will have to be more patient than they likely expected, though, as the studio said in its recent financial results Q&A that the remake won’t be out until sometime after the launch of The Witcher 4 (opens in new tab).
“[The Witcher remake] will come after Polaris, which is a consequence of how we think about this project,” CD Projekt CEO Adam Kiciński said in response to a question about the remake launch timing. “We think that [the] remake will be based in big part on technologies from Polaris. So, it will be developed partially parallel to Polaris, but once Polaris is launched, everything for Polaris will be then in the final shape and it will be, partially, be produced in [the] remake.”
“Polaris” is CD Projekt’s codename for the next Witcher game, which we call The Witcher 4 even though the studio does not. It was announced in March with a minimum of detail except that it will be developed using Unreal Engine 5 rather than CD Projekt’s own Red Engine; it doesn’t look like Geralt will be involved, or at least won’t be the central character, and in fact it appears that the game will focus on an entirely different school of witchers (opens in new tab), possibly one created specifically for the game rather than being drawn from Andrzej Sapkowski’s fiction.
The Witcher 4 will be the start of an all-new Witcher trilogy, but there’s no sign of a release date yet, and pre-production only began in the summer. CD Projekt indicated in its most recent financial report (opens in new tab) that fewer than a quarter of its developers are currently working on The Witcher 4—the bulk of the studio’s resources remain committed to Cyberpunk 2077 and its upcoming expansion, Phantom Liberty.
Kiciński also touched on Sirius, the codename for the Witcher spinoff game (opens in new tab) being developed by Flame in the Flood studio The Molasses Flood, although he didn’t have much to share. “We are not guiding anyhow, anything about [the] design of this game,” he said. “So, we are not talking about the size or what type of game it is. We just said that the design is to be accessible for [a] broader audience, and that’s it.”
While he wasn’t willing to talk much about Sirius, Kiciński did explain his reluctance, saying that CD Projekt is preparing for “the right moment” to talk about it. CD Projekt said in March 2021 that unlike the years-long marketing campaign for Cyberpunk 2077 (which was elongated even further than planned by numerous delays), trailers and demos for future games would not be shared until they were “much closer” to launch (opens in new tab), and apparently it’s sticking to that strategy.
“As the product is very different from anything we’ve released so far, we have to be sure that gamers first will understand properly what the game is about,” Kiciński said. So, that’s why we are not saying anything, and we are not describing what type of game and what kind of size of the game it is.”
CD Projekt has provided a (very wide open) window for The Witcher 4 (and other games), saying in October that it plans to put out all three games in the new Witcher trilogy within six years (opens in new tab) of Polaris’s launch. Personally, I think the odds of that actually happening are approximately zero.
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