CD Projekt RED (CDPR) has revealed who will be one of the voice actors in The Witcher 4, and the Polish developers now have no excuse to start full development.

It has emerged on Reddit that one character, Branko, will be played by British actor Jake Lampert. The date for the role is listed as 2025, which means that the voice acting and motion capture work will start next year. This suggests that the release of the game is still a long way off, as such things are usually not done in the middle or towards the end of full-scale development…

The last time we heard, The Witcher 4 (Polaris – even though it’s the codename for a new trilogy) was still in the pre-production phase of development, close to a major milestone that would make it a game in development. That was in August, but since then we haven’t heard anything from CDPR about it, so this could be where the game is now, as the Polish company was aiming to achieve this in 2024, no longer using REDengine, its proprietary technology, but Unreal Engine 5.

Coming back to Lampert, if you look at his Spotlight profile, the director position was held by Kate Saxon. She has been working for CDPR in London as a sound and mocap director since the 2000s. According to the MobyGames database, she also worked on The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and Cyberpunk 2077. He was listed as the lead voice director in the cast list for both Witcher games, while he was listed as one of the additional voice directors for Cyberpunk 2077.

The year before last, CDPR said in October that The Witcher 4 was at least three years away from release, and that almost half of the Polish crew had been working on it since the end of 2023. It could arrive for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series and PC in late 2025, but they don’t want to release another half-baked game after Cyberpunk 2077.

Maybe they’ll get it right this time.

Source: GameRant