CD Projekt Red confirmed today that it's planning to make a new Witcher trilogy and release every entry over the course of six years, and nobody's quite sure if that's a good thing.
The Witcher 4 (which still doesn't have an official title, and is known internally as Project Polaris) is currently in pre-production, and there's no word yet on when it will launch. But whenever it does go live, it's going to kick off a six-year span in which the entire trilogy is set to be released. In other words, you can expect about a three year gap between each entry in the trilogy.
That's on top of the Cyberpunk 2077 DLC, the Cyberpunk sequel, the new Witcher game in development at The Molasses Flood, the mysterious Witcher RPG in development at an unnamed third-party studio, and a new IP from CD Projekt.
- The Witcher 4 is set to be CD Projekt Red's "most immersive and ambitious open-world Witcher game to date," with a "brutal" world and "the start of a new saga"
- CD Projekt Red says its "ambition is high, crazily high" with The Witcher 4 as devs hope to "apply all the lessons learned" from Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3
Given the five-year gap between launch of The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, and the fact that the latter released with no shortage of issues, the response to the news has been mixed.
"This sounds like way, way too much to announce when everything is basically in pre-prod," Reddit user archlector says. "And planning for 2 more sequels, 3 years apart? That seems like madness..."
"I really don’t like sound of that 3 games in 6 years part," LionPride112 says. "I want them to put more time and care into each game and not mass produce them like this."
Kadianye succinctly says "I've got no faith after CP2077."
Of course, it's not impossible for a big studio to release a series of three big RPGs in the span of six years - Assassin's Creed Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla all launched in a four-year span.
CD Projekt president Adam Kiciński did say as part of today's announcement that "both the second and third installments will, in technological terms, benefit from the groundwork laid during the development of Polaris. In this way we aim to smoothen the development process while at the same time staying creatively ambitious."
The elephant in the room here is CD Projekt's history of crunch. The tight development cycle could exacerbate that problem, though the director of Polaris has been adamant that it won't happen again here.
For more on everything announced at the CD Projekt Red investor call, you can follow that link.
