Thursday, March 27th 2025
CD Projekt Red Anticipates "The Witcher IV" Release Window: After 2026
CD Projekt RED unveiled its primary development project late last year: The Witcher IV. A pre-rendered cinematic trailer—utilizing a highly-customized Unreal Engine 5 build running on mystery NVIDIA GPU—showcased next-generation visuals. As revealed by NVIDIA in the new year, a GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card acted as the processing conduit for CD Projekt Red's fantasy featurette. Months later, company leadership has divulged a very loose timeframe for the highly-anticipated sequel's eventual launch. During a recent call with investors—exploring financial results from 2024, and future forecasts—the company expects profits to climb consistently over the next three years. As highlighted by many news reports, long-term franchise fans will need to remain patient—CD Projekt's calendar for next year seems to be free of forthcoming AAA content: "even though we do not plan to release The Witcher 4 by the end of 2026, we are still driven by this financial goal."
Given the Polish company's flagship branch kicking into a "full production" high gear phase around late 2024, a project on the (triple-A+) scale of The Witcher IV would require a long gestation period. Renewed online theories have placed a potential release window somewhere in 2027, possibly coinciding with the rollout of next-gen consoles. A noted industry soothsayer and veteran games journalist—Jason Schreier (resident at Bloomberg)—weighed in on the matter. He has dismissed many predictive reports about The Witcher IV arriving in 2026, as well as Naughty Dog's "The Heretic Prophet"—commenting on this topic, he stated: "I'm pretty sure I said they were both going to be very early teases. Neither of those games will be out next year." Piotr Nielubowicz—CD Projekt's chief financial officer—did not go into specifics during his firm's recently concluded earnings call: "we are not going to announce the precise launch date for the game yet. All we could share now to give more visibility to investors is that the game will not be launched within the time frame of the first target for the incentive program, which ends December 31, 2026."
During this month's investors meeting, CD Projekt's co-CEO—Michał Nowakowski—stated that his Witcher sequel team would not be embracing generative AI development tools: "I think we mentioned before that last year, we set up a team that's investigating the potential use of AI solutions in our future products, including development of our own customized AI models...And we have several research projects underway. However, they are really not necessarily focusing on generative AI. Gen AI, to be honest, is quite tricky when it comes to legal IP ownership and so on, and many other aspects. So when it comes to implementation of any Gen AI in the actual games, we really have nothing happening when it comes to Witcher 4 or any projects in the near future."
Sources:
CD PROJEKT IR YouTube Channel, CD PROJEKT Financial Results Center, Eurogamer, Polygon, Games Radar, Jason Schreier (via Resetera), PC Gamer
Given the Polish company's flagship branch kicking into a "full production" high gear phase around late 2024, a project on the (triple-A+) scale of The Witcher IV would require a long gestation period. Renewed online theories have placed a potential release window somewhere in 2027, possibly coinciding with the rollout of next-gen consoles. A noted industry soothsayer and veteran games journalist—Jason Schreier (resident at Bloomberg)—weighed in on the matter. He has dismissed many predictive reports about The Witcher IV arriving in 2026, as well as Naughty Dog's "The Heretic Prophet"—commenting on this topic, he stated: "I'm pretty sure I said they were both going to be very early teases. Neither of those games will be out next year." Piotr Nielubowicz—CD Projekt's chief financial officer—did not go into specifics during his firm's recently concluded earnings call: "we are not going to announce the precise launch date for the game yet. All we could share now to give more visibility to investors is that the game will not be launched within the time frame of the first target for the incentive program, which ends December 31, 2026."
13 Comments on CD Projekt Red Anticipates "The Witcher IV" Release Window: After 2026
Frankly, while their shareholders might care, I don't think the industry cares anymore how long these things take. We've long since moved into the "Announcing the upcoming announcement of the teaser trailer for a game we're begun, Maybe™" era of marketing. Community managers need jobs and hype can be gained - and squandered - long before a game is ready.
As long as CDPR does the following, I and their bank balance will be happy
- Don't fuck up the release by having terrible performance on anemic-boxes. Create a "killer app" that makes console players want to buy a PC this time.
- Show us what true artistry can do with UE5. I maintain to this day that CP2077 driving from neighbourhood to neighbourhood with no HUD/radio is very immersive and as close to real life as a game has gotten. I want to see that level of quiet confident skill make UE5 visuals sing and dance.
Take until 2029 for all I care. The Witcher is not to be fumbled.They're the only ones with the money, talent, patience and creative desire to not phone it in.
There were some glitches, sure, which is to be expected for a game of this scale and, yes, the police system was a joke. But aside from fixing these, 5 years later the game is pretty much the same. The Night City is as static as it always had been, and what carries the game is entertaining combat and mouth-watering visuals. Which is to say, it's quite awesome, albeit in a rather limited way.
As for the Witcher 4, I'm also dismayed by Ciri as the lead. That’s not because I’m a womanhater, I've just always found her somewhat irritating. I wouldn't mind a new lead, even female one (someone more mature, like eg Yennefer) but that "edgy magical child" leaves me cold.
That aside from my worries about their main gameplay design direction. If it's like TW3, where you only get serious XP for doing quests, it could put me off this game for good.
What I don't understand though, is their odd decision to stop producing new addons to Cyberpunk 2077 for the next couple of years to keep revenue coming in. Although I hear there might be a surprise coming on that front soon. I can only hope.
• Most devs are doing the foliage wrong (mostly because it takes way less manhours). The old fashioned way of hiding the geometry flaws under the transparency masks and all that fancy stuff is fine by any other engine but UE5 hates it and penalizes you for it. What we need to get the most advantage from Nanite in particular and UE5 in general is full opacity so what you see is what is actually under the hood.
• Many devs are overdoing on textures. There's absolutely zero reason to use 8K textures, yet here we are. 3072x3072 is probably the hottest we actually need. 4096x4096 and hotter should only be left for tech demo games.
• A lot of studio CEOs are beyond absolute greedsters and they want the game right here, right now so devs have no other choice but to fix the game enough it doesn't crash, having absolutely negative time budget for fixing the performance penalties.
• And indeed, you CAN make a game that doesn't look like you're overdosed and doesn't demand a graphical monster to run smoothly.
Given CDPR do it right we'll see the game that both looks gorgeous, runs 1080p60 on 300ish dollar GPUs (maybe even those of today) and doesn't provoke wrath and fluxing.
Given how CDPR did their latest games and how many developers had been swapped out I'm not entirely convinced it's gonna be exactly that. Not entirely unrealistic but safe to say one must be an optimist to believe Witcher 4 will be a model game. I'd place my bets on it just being good, even outstanding in some respects, but with a considerable amount of asterisks.