CD Projekt RED has shared a vital update on progress for the next The Witcher game.
In a video message, CD Projekt RED CFO Piotr Nielubowicz revealed that the Polaris team is “working on the next game in the Witcher saga”, and that they have “made substantial progress.” He goes on to say that they will be able “to wrap up preproduction and take this project to the full production phase.”
IGN has more details from CD Projekt RED’s latest financial call. Michał Nowakowski, one of the company’s CEOs, told investors that Polaris grew from 407 members at the end of April, to 410 members at the end of July. Of course, that isn’t that much growth, but those 410 developers are the majority of the studio’s 639 member headcount.
Nowakowski also said that “The Polaris team is maintaining the right scale to enter the production stage very soon.”
This The Witcher game was announced in 2022, but given the current announced state, it is unlikely that it will hit its original planned release year of 2025. Adam Badowski, CD Projekt RED’s other CEO, told the press last January that they do expect Polaris to start the proper production phase within this year.
CD Projekt RED will have to keep their investors happy with small updates like these as video games can take as much as half a decade to make now. They gave essentially the same update to those investors last month, too.
The Witcher video game franchise is in a somewhat ambiguous state. It has been nine years since the release of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and eight years since The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Blood and Wine, its last expansion.
CD Projekt RED had an ambitious plan to keep fans happy with smaller spinoff games. So Gwent was released as a standalone card game in 2018. CD Projekt Red had real esports ambitions for Gwent, but the 2022 expansion Rogue Mage would be a commercial flop. They eventually ended support on October 2023, and laid off some of the staff who worked on it.
There was also Thronebreaker, a 30 hour story campaign video game, that employed the same card battle mechanics as Gwent. Thronebreaker received widespread critical acclaim, but would also flop.
But perhaps the biggest setback The Witcher and CD Projekt RED faced was discovering they had an impairment in their finances, in early 2023. They announced layoffs of 100 in July 2023, including the devs at Gwent.
Those layoffs also included staff at The Molasses Flood, who are themselves making a spinoff The Witcher game of their own codenamed Project Sirius. While Project Sirius has not been cancelled, they have redefined the game’s scope, perhaps to rein in the budget.
We shouldn’t forget that this game’s director, Sebastien Kalemba, went on record that the game would not be coming out for several years, and he said this in 2023. Given the higher stakes for CD Projekt RED, we are sure they are doing all they can to make the wait worthwhile.
