CD Projekt Red Says Witcher 4 Will Be “Better, Bigger, Greater” Than Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk

CD Projekt Red has started teasing its upcoming fourth Witcher game. Following the mismanaged launch, and subsequent redemption, of Cyberpunk 2077, the Polish developer has been hard at work on continuing the Witcher franchise, with the project entering full production earlier this year.

Speaking to Eurogamer, many CDPR developers and executives have started laying down the strategy behind the upcoming game’s development. At the heart of its new development pipeline is the team’s switch to Unreal Engine 5, replacing its in-house REDengine, to support multiple projects in development simultaneously.

“The way we built stuff in the past was very one-sided, like one project at a time,” said Charles Tremblay, CDPR’s vice president of technology. “We pushed the limit – but also we saw that if we wanted to have a multi-project at the same time, building in parallel, sharing technology together, it is not easy.”

Changing the game engine won’t necessarily result in a better game, but Trembley is confident that the team will remain ambitious and push the boundaries of technology.

“Again, I will not say it’s easy, but I think that we have some cool stuff going, and hopefully that will have some good showcase [of the technology],” he added.

“The only thing I will say is that changing the tech for us does not change the fact that we always will be ambitious,” he said. “And the next game we do will not be smaller, and it will not be worse. So it will be better, bigger, greater than The Witcher 3, it will be better than Cyberpunk – because for us, it’s unacceptable [to launch that way]. We don’t want to go back.”

One of the many failures of Cyberpunk was its poor technical state on last-generation consoles. At launch, many players reported crashes, bugs, and even cases of consoles getting bricked by playing Cyberpunk 2077 on them. Tremblay emphasized that CDPR will pay extra attention to the console build of the game, and perhaps even launch on multiple platforms at the same time.

“It’s something we discussed, actually, but we’re not 100 percent sure,” said Tremblay. “Maybe – so it’s hard to say if we want to go this way at this stage. I would assume that as long as I understand, like, the strategy we want to do – I’m just trying not to say too much, bear with me – most likely, the launch, we will not have a PC-only launch, for example. I don’t think this is a strategy we want to adopt right now. That being said, will it mean that we will have – let’s say there were 20 platforms available – we’ll have 20 at launch? Maybe not. But at least PC only, and then scattered, it’s not necessarily the approach we want to go forward, for sure.”

CEO Michał Nowakowski also spoke about keeping the target platforms in focus to avoid another situation that could lead to a technical misfire. “I think what put us into a lot of trouble is how late we started with PS4 and the Xbox [One] back in the day, and we don’t ever want to be in that same spot again,” he said.

The next Witcher game and the sequel to Cyberpunk 2077 are currently in development at CD Projekt Red. No announced release dates or target platforms have been announced.