CD Projekt is already planning multiple new Witcher games

witcher 3 ciri endings — (Image credit: CD Projekt RED)

Earlier this year CD Projekt Red announced a yet-unnamed The Witcher 4, the beginning of a new "saga" for The Witcher—which now seems likely to be a trilogy. "We said that there will be a new saga. We have in mind more than one," CEO Adam Kiciński said today during a financial earnings call.

"The first saga was three games, so now we are thinking about more than one game," Kiciński said. "But we are in pre-production of the first game from the second Witcher saga." Kiciński reiterated that the current sequel is being developed in Unreal Engine 5, a big shift away from CD Projekt's own internal tools.

CD Projekt's long-term planning makes it sound like the first game in its new saga could plant seeds for future entries, probably far more deliberately than the original Witcher did. The Witcher 2 offered up more connective tissue for The Witcher 3, including save files that carried over your relationships with several characters (and whether they're even alive).

If CD Projekt is sketching out a whole trilogy from the get-go, could we even see a Mass Effect-style throughline between games, with decisions that carry through all three? It's a cool possibility to consider, though it'll likely be a decade before we could see an idea like that bear fruit.

Whatever the name of the next Witcher game is, it won't actually be The Witcher 4. "The Witcher was designed as a trilogy and a trilogy cannot have a fourth part, can it?" CD Projekt's Marcin Iwinski said back in 2017. We don't know much more about it, other than that it's in pre-production, and that there's a good chance it focuses on the Lynx school branch of witchers, based on the pendant in the teaser image CD Projekt released several months ago.

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Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).