CD Projekt has reaffirmed plans to release three Witcher games within six years, as Cyberpunk 2077 hits a big sales milestone.
The Witcher 4 might be nominated for the Most Anticipated Game at this month’s The Game Awards, but don’t expect it to launch anytime soon.
CD Projekt previously said the sequel, the start of a new trilogy, will not be released before 2027. The studio’s co-CEO Michal Nowakowski has now reaffirmed this in a financial call, while committing to its plan to release all three Witcher games in the planned trilogy within a six year period.
While this might sound ambitious at a time when AAA games are taking longer to develop than ever, Nowakowski cites the studio’s progress using Unreal Engine 5 as a key reason why it should be possible.
‘In a way, yes, I do believe that further games should be delivered in a shorter period of time – as we had stated before, our plan still is to launch the whole trilogy within a six year period, so yes, that would mean we would plan to have a shorter development time between [The Witcher 4] and [The Witcher 5], between [The Witcher 5] and [The Witcher 6] and so on…,’ Nowakowski said.
So if The Witcher 4 does launch in 2027, that means The Witcher 5 and The Witcher 6 could arrive in 2030 and 2033, respectively. This is the best case scenario though, as there’s every chance The Witcher 4 doesn’t arrive until 2028 (or CD Projekt decides to abandon this plan entirely).
This seems an extraordinarily short amount of time to make a giant game like this, especial as CD Projekt made no mention of AI. Perhaps all three games will be set in the same open world, but even so it’s a completely different time frame to every other big name developer working at the moment.
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‘As we have already stated, The Witcher 4 is in the full-scale production phase,’ Nowakowski added. ‘We’re not disclosing any details regarding the target release date, so there’s not a point in time I could refer to when answering such a question. The only thing we’re commenting is that we’re not launching in 2026…’
Along with The Witcher 4, a remake of the first Witcher game is in development at developer Fool’s Theory. CD Projekt refused to comment when asked about a potential release date for the remake, but it’s possible it could launch next year as a stop-gap.
While The Witcher 4 is in full production, CD Projekt is also in pre-production on the sequel to Cyberpunk 2077. In the earnings call, the developer confirmed the original game has sold over 35 million copies since it launched on December 10, 2020.
CD Projekt might have news in store for Cyberpunk 2077’s fifth anniversary too. In a post on the game’s official X account, it made a point to highlight the game’s upcoming anniversary on December 10, suggesting some kind of announcement will take place.
The post also shows several in-game character birthdays in December – Solomon Reed and So Mi Song – but considering the same account has done this for other characters in recent months, it’s likely those dates are not signficiant.
It’s unclear what could be announced to celebrate Cyberpunk 2077’s fifth birthday, but some fans are hoping for another sizeable update, like patch 2.3 in July.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners season two doesn’t have a release date yet either, so it could turn it into a showcase for other media in the Cyberpunk universe. Either way, we wouldn’t expect too much.
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