According to Ars Technica, CD Projekt Red VP Michał Nowakowski recently reaffirmed the studio’s plan to release three new Witcher games within a six-year window, starting from the launch of the upcoming The Witcher 4. This ambitious schedule, first promised in 2022, is heavily reliant on the company’s transition from its own problematic REDEngine to Epic’s Unreal Engine, which began in 2022. The developer count for the first game, codenamed “Project Polaris,” has ballooned from over 150 to 447 active developers. However, CDPR has already confirmed that The Witcher 4 will not launch in 2026, pushing the entire timeline back. The studio is juggling this alongside a Cyberpunk 2077 sequel with a team projected to hit 300+ by 2027, a multiplayer Witcher spinoff, a full remake of the first Witcher game, and a new IP.
The Engine of Ambition
Here’s the thing: CDPR’s entire promise is built on the bet that Unreal Engine will be their savior. They blamed the REDEngine’s “in-game streaming system” for the disastrous launch state of Cyberpunk 2077 on consoles. So, moving to a widely-supported, third-party engine like Unreal is supposed to bring “predictability and efficiency.” In theory, that makes sense. Building one massive open-world game (The Witcher 4) on the engine creates a foundation, or a “template,” that can be iterated on much faster for the sequels. They showed a slick tech demo running on PS5 this summer, but it was explicitly not actual gameplay. So we’re still taking a lot on faith. The real question is whether the notorious scope and detail of a Witcher game can truly be tamed by an off-the-shelf engine, even one as powerful as Unreal.
A Crowded Slate and Creep
But let’s not ignore the sheer volume of work here. The six-year clock for the Witcher trilogy hasn’t even started because we don’t have a release date for the first game. And while they’re building that new Witcher foundation, they’re also trying to build a whole new Cyberpunk sequel. That’s two completely different, massive AAA franchises in full production at once. For a studio that had about 250 people when The Witcher 3 launched, that’s a staggering expansion. It’s how you get feature creep, crunch, and potential quality issues. Can their management and production pipelines really handle this? History suggests this is exactly the kind of over-promising that leads to under-delivering.
The Future-Proofing Problem
There’s another, more technical wrinkle. Say they launch The Witcher 4 in, say, 2027. To hit three games in six years, The Witcher 6 would land around 2033. The hardware landscape will be utterly different. We’ll likely be deep into a next console generation and several GPU architectures beyond today’s tech. Epic’s CEO has said a preview of Unreal Engine 6 could be 2-3 years away. Is the tech they’re building now for TW4 going to be relevant for TW6? Or will they have to stop mid-trilogy for a massive engine overhaul? It seems like they’re planning a sprint, but the track itself is going to change shape beneath their feet.
Can They Actually Do It?
Look, I want them to succeed. More great Witcher games? Sign me up. But this plan feels like a direct, aggressive reaction to the long droughts and the Cyberpunk launch scandal. They want to prove they can be efficient and reliable. The move to Unreal is the logical cornerstone of that. You can see their commitment in the earnings report and the growing team size. But promising three sprawling RPGs in six years, while doing everything else, is borderline insane in modern game dev. Basically, they’re betting the future of their flagship franchise on an engine transition and production scale they’ve never achieved before. I think we should be excited, but keep our expectations firmly in check. The first real gameplay reveal of The Witcher 4 will tell us a lot about whether this dream schedule is even remotely possible.
