Fans of The Witcher franchise might be chomping at the bit as news comes that CD PROJEKT RED is preparing to go all in for the next game. The announcement comes from CD PROJEKT RED CEO Adam Kiciński who shared in the company’s earnings call that it is about to shift the bulk of its development team over to the new game, currently codenamed Polaris, following the launch of Cyberpunk 2077’s highly anticipated forthcoming expansion.
Per Adam Kiciński (via VGC):
“At the end of July, the Phantom Liberty team working on the pre-release phase consisted of 300 people,” he said during an earnings call. “That’s fewer than at the end of 2022, but it still it remains our biggest team. On the other hand, the Polaris team has grown to almost 260 developers at the end of July.”
“After releasing Phantom Liberty, we will transfer a big part of the team to Polaris,” he added later.”
The next Witcher game will see a major change for the franchise as CDPR shifts away from using its own REDengine over to the Unreal 5 engine. Details regarding the story, or main character are still unknown but the company did provide the following
Per CDPR:
“We’re happy to announce that the next installment in The Witcher series of video games is currently in development, kicking off a new saga for the franchise.
This is an exciting moment as we’re moving from REDengine to Unreal Engine 5, beginning a multi-year strategic partnership with Epic Games. It covers not only licensing, but technical development of Unreal Engine 5, as well as potential future versions of Unreal Engine, where relevant. We’ll closely collaborate with Epic Games’ developers with the primary goal being to help tailor the engine for open-world experiences.
At this point, no further details regarding the game — such as a development time frame or release date — are available.
REDengine, the technology which powers Cyberpunk 2077, is still being used for the development of the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 expansion.”
In the year and a half since CDPR announced the next game it has gone through many changes since then. It has experienced a variety of staffing challenges from layoffs while also trying to expand with new offices in North America but hopefully, things are beginning to stabilize for it and fans may only have to wait a couple, or few more, years for another epic addition to the franchise.