CD Projekt promises that, compared to The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 4 'will not be smaller, and it will not be worse'
"We don't want to go back."
The Witcher 4 is finally in full production, as CD Projekt announced during its Q3 financial update. The game, which is still codenamed Project Polaris, moved into full-scale production several weeks ago, chief financial officer Piotr Nielubowicz said.
Speaking to Eurogamer, CD Projekt Red's vice president of technology, Charles Tremblay, discussed the switch from the internally developed REDengine, last used on Cyberpunk 2077, to Unreal Engine 5. "I will not say it's easy," he said, "but I think that we have some cool stuff going, and hopefully that will have some good showcase [of the technology]. The only thing I will say is that changing the tech for us does not change the fact that we always will be ambitious".
Tremblay went on to declare Project Polaris, which is currently being worked on by 400 members of CDPR's 650-strong staff, would be bigger and better than anything the studio had done before. "And the next game we do will not be smaller, and it will not be worse. So it will be better, bigger, greater than The Witcher 3, it will be better than Cyberpunk—because for us, it's unacceptable [to launch that way]. We don't want to go back."
Changing to a completely different engine can't be easy, and Tremblay didn't deny that there would be issues. "Even if there will be some 'sweaty moments' and maybe even some bad stuff happening," he said, "still, I think that we will try everything we can to make it even more than what we achieved in the past years. So the technology should not be a blocker for us, basically."
The next Witcher game doesn't have a release date yet, and given the multiple delays of Cyberpunk 2077 it wouldn't be surprising if the studio waited until it had really nailed down the schedule before announcing anything. We do know that Geralt voice actor Doug Cockle is returning, although Geralt won't be the main character.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.
Path of Exile 2 is already one of the top 20 most played games in Steam's history even though it's in early access and all the servers have been on fire
Path of Exile 2 players are finally getting into the game: 'What we are doing right now is letting in players in batches so that we can make sure to monitor the backend and not overload it'