CD Projekt RED (CDPR) will not repeat the amateur mistakes with The Witcher 4 we saw them make before the release of Cyberpunk 2077…
CDPR’s project, codenamed Polaris, is the new Witcher trilogy. CDP co-CEO Michał Nowakowski told Eurogamer that they are getting smarter about announcements and marketing campaigns, and that includes The Witcher 4. “To be honest, when we officially kicked off the marketing campaign with pre-orders, which was the Keanu Reeves on stage [moment, at E3 in June 2019], the plan was actually to launch about a year later.
It just didn’t really work out. So we didn’t plan for a two-year campaign, and I still think one year would be really good [in terms of] time for a promotional campaign for this game. We’ll announce the [release] date when we’re sure about it. And now I think we have much better tools to be sure of that date, which we – on a smaller scale – proved to ourselves with Phantom Liberty,” Nowakowski said.
Marketing for Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty lasted six months, but a new game would have a longer marketing period, but not two years. The campaign will start before the full onslaught, at which point the game will be available for pre-order and a release date will be announced. From then on it’s a race against time to get the game ready. However, The Witcher 4 won’t be a completely silent team: CDPR will drop crumbs here and there so that the press can find out what the Polish developers are thinking about this time.
The game is already in full development on Unreal Engine 5 (we wrote about it before). Charles Tremblay, CDPR’s technical director, said that it’s not an easy technology change, but they have some cool stuff and hopefully, they’ll be able to show it off. Despite the engine change, they remain ambitious. The game is being worked on by 400 of the 650 employees and will be bigger and better than The Witcher 3 or Cyberpunk 2077. They don’t want to go backward. The engine change will cause some awkward moments, but they don’t think the new technology will hinder them.
So The Witcher 4 will be released less than two years after its reveal, and that makes sense.
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