The Witcher Remake won’t be released anytime soon, according to Adam Kiciński, President and Joint CEO of CD PROJEKT, who teased the upcoming project during a webcast this week and revealed that the “re-imagining” of the 2007 action role-playing game based on Andrzej Sapkowski’s fantasy novel series will not launch before The Witcher 4 (codename: Polaris), the next mainline installment of the franchise that is also being developed using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5:
“[…] it will come after Polaris, which is a consequence of how we view this project,” Kiciński said during an audio webcast published on Monday complementing CD PROJEKT Group’s Q3 2022 earnings report. “The remake will be largely based on technologies used in Polaris, so development will proceed in parallel with Polaris, but once Polaris is launched, its base technologies will be ready for partial reuse in the remake.”
Announced in October 2022, The Witcher Remake is an updated version of the original game that is being rebuilt from the ground up in Unreal Engine 5 by the team at Polish studio Fool’s Theory, whose staff includes experienced developers who have previously worked on The Witcher games.
Complementing it will be Project Sirius, another game that will be set in The Witcher universe, offering both single-player and multiplayer gameplay.
The Molasses Flood, which is developing Sirius, has been given a lot of creative reign over the project, according to additional comments that Kiciński shared with investors:
“[…] we are not guiding on this game when it comes to its size or what type of game it is; we only stated that it would be accessible to a broader audience,” the executive said, although he opted to keep the game mysterious and wouldn’t say whether Sirius will come before or after The Witcher 4.
“There’s a very clear business purpose to this: we have to prepare ourselves to communicate more information around this project when the time comes,” explained Kiciński. “As the product is different than anything we’ve released so far, we have to be sure that gamers can understand what the game is about – this is why we’re not describing what kind of game it is, or what its size will be.”
A free next-gen update for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt with improved visuals and more will be released for the PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X on December 14th, 2022.