CD Projekt RED (CDPR) has admitted that they will not remake The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt with the next installment of the franchise, and there will definitely be a change in technology, with the Polish studio using Unreal Engine 5 instead of REDengine.

CDPR currently employs 627 people, and almost two-thirds of them are working on the project codenamed Polaris. This includes the new The Witcher storyline, which means that 403 people are working on The Witcher 4, and the Polish studio talked about this in its 2023 financial report. The consequence of this (which is perfectly understandable) is that Cyberpunk 2077 has a very limited team, with only 17 people working on it (enough for patches), but the sequel (codenamed Orion) has 47. The Boston studio is likely to add more people later, as development hasn’t really started yet, and after The Witcher 4, many people will surely join the Orion team.

Michał Nowakowski, co-CEO of CDPR, could not say when The Witcher 4 would be released, as it is part of their marketing plan and something he did not want to talk about on the shareholder conference call. A new game is always a creative risk, he said, because they want to push new boundaries and explore new areas, because they want to create something that hasn’t been done before. He added that we shouldn’t expect a new The Witcher 3 in a new guise, but of course they’re going to build on what they’ve done and what they’ve learned from it, but they’re going to add new things, new elements to the gameplay and new mechanics that we haven’t seen in their previous games.

The Witcher 4 is supposed to go into full development in 2024. This hasn’t happened yet, as Polaris is in pre-production, pre-development phase, but CDPR plans to hit the accelerator in the second half of the year, July at the earliest. Don’t expect a release in 1-2 years; by the time they’re done, it could be available for the new PlayStation and Xbox.

Source: PCGamer