Witcher Remake to be Developed Alongside Witcher 4 But Released Afterwards

The recent declaration that The Witcher Remake would be reworked to be an open-world game sparked a lot of excitement from the many admirers of the classic. However, it seems that there could be a lengthy wait. The Witcher Remake won’t be launched before The Witcher 4 (codenamed Polaris) since it will make use of the tools and technology created for that game, according to the president and joint CEO Adam Kiciński during the Q&A part of CD Projekt RED’s Q3 2022 earnings call.

Coming back to The Witcher Remake and when it will come, yes, it will come after Polaris (The Witcher 4), which is a consequence of how we think about this project. I think that The Witcher Remake will be based in big part on technologies from Polaris, so it will be developed partially in parallel to Polaris, but once Polaris is launched, everything for Polaris will be then in the final shape, and it will be partially reused in the remake.”

Given that Polaris will be CD Projekt RED’s first game to use Unreal Engine 5, it makes sense. The Polish firm, as some of you may remember, boasted full-fledged cooperation with Epic Games where they would also seek to enhance the engine’s capacity to generate open-world roleplaying games. Of course, CD Projekt RED will support The Witcher Remake even if it will be mostly created by Fool’s Theory.

While The Witcher Remake and The Witcher 4 may be receiving the most attention when it comes to upcoming releases in the series, CD Projekt RED is also assisting the creation of a spin-off game being developed by The Molasses Flood under the codename Sirius. Kiciński said that it will be a significantly different game from the typical CDPR output and aimed at a wider audience on the abovementioned earnings call.

We are not guiding anything about the design of Project Sirius, so we are not talking about the size or what type of game it is. We just said that the design is to be accessible to a broader audience. There is a very clear business purpose through it because we have to prepare ourselves in the right moment to communicate the product to gamers, as the product is very different from anything we’ve released so far.” 

Finally, Kiciński refused to specify whether Project Polaris or Sirius would be made public first, leaving it up to speculation for the time being. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s Next-Gen release is just around the horizon, while Cyberpunk 2077’s expansion Phantom Liberty is almost finished, indicating a timeframe in the first half of 2023