CD Projekt Red announces new Witcher video game

Witcher fans, soon we’ll be back on the Path! CD Projekt Red, the studio behind the wildly successful Witcher video game franchise, has just announced that a new installment is coming in the series. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is one of the most successful games of all time; it won upwards of 250 Game of the Year awards, and played a crucial role in The Witcher novels getting translated into tons of new territories. Which, of course, led to the massively popular Netflix series.

Ever since The Witcher 3, fans have been clamoring for a new game in the franchise. For their part, CD Projekt Red has played coy. The final expansion of The Witcher 3, Blood & Wine, saw Geralt of Rivia entering into a retirement of sorts in the rolling sunlit fields of Toussaint. It was an excellent send-off for the character, so it made sense that CD Projekt Red wasn’t eager to dive right into another game.

Yet now, an official announcement is here. A new mainline Witcher game is coming.

“A new saga begins” in the next Witcher video game

The announcement comes directly from CD Projekt Red itself, complete with an exciting image that shows a witcher’s medallion in the snow. “A new saga begins,” the image reads. This seems to imply that this will not necessarily be a continuation of Geralt’s story, but could be something totally new. (Although I’d be surprised if none of our mainstay characters appeared at all.)

This is further backed up the medallion itself. Note that it is not a wolf’s head like Geralt’s, but a cat. The Cat School is one of the other witcher schools on the Continent. Unlike the noble Wolf School witchers like Geralt, the School of the Cat has a somewhat unsavory reputation because many of those that trained there eventually hired out their swords and worked as assassins.

The Witcher 4 will use Unreal Engine 5

This next Witcher game is part of a new long-term deal between CD Projekt Red and Epic Games, and will be built using Epic’s Unreal Engine 5. Previous Witcher games, as well as Cyberpunk 2077, were all built on CD Projekt Red’s own REDengine. The switch to Unreal 5 for the next run of Witcher games speaks to the company’s dedication to continuously expanding its technology to provide even more seamless gaming experiences. It’ll also probably come as somewhat reassuring to the many fans who experienced technical issues with Cyberpunk 2077, since Unreal is a more stable and widely used gaming engine.

CD Projekt Red CTO Paweł Zawodny had this to say about the switch:

"One of the core aspects of our internal RED 2.0 Transformation is a much stronger focus on technology, and our cooperation with Epic Games is based on this principle. From the outset, we did not consider a typical licensing arrangement; both we and Epic see this as a long-term, fulfilling tech partnership. It is vital for CD PROJEKT RED to have the technical direction of our next game decided from the earliest possible phase as; in the past, we spent a lot of resources and energy to evolve and adapt REDengine with every subsequent game release. This cooperation is so exciting, because it will elevate development predictability and efficiency, while simultaneously granting us access to cutting-edge game development tools. I can’t wait for the great games we’re going to create using Unreal Engine 5!"

Tim Sweeney, Founder and CEO of Epic Games, weighed in as well. “Epic has been building Unreal Engine 5 to enable teams to create dynamic open worlds at an unprecedented scale and level of fidelity. We are deeply honored by the opportunity to partner with CD PROJEKT RED to push the limits of interactive storytelling and gameplay together, and this effort will benefit the developer community for years to come.”

The bottom line is this: CD Projekt Red is making a new Witcher game, and they will not be solely responsible for handling the fine-tuning of their gaming engine on the backend. Hopefully this will allow them to avoid some of the numerous snafus that surrounded the release of Cyberpunk 2077.

Cyberpunk 2077 expansion is still in the works

Speaking of Cyberpunk 2077, the announcement about the next Witcher game also included an interesting tidbit about that game as well. While Cyberpunk itself is a pretty great game, it has been plagued by technical errors that have dogged it throughout its entire release cycle; they were so bad upon release that Sony pulled it from the Playstation 4 store and offered an almost unheard of blanket refund to anyone who purchased the game digitally. The fraught release cycle of Cyberpunk has led some fans to speculate whether we’d ever see an actual expansion for the game, since the timeline for any DLC content was seemingly pushed back due to the many fires CD Projekt Red’s developers have had to put out.

But according to the press release for the new Witcher game, a Cyberpunk 2077 expansion is still in active development. According to the statement, the Cyberpunk 2077 expansion is still being developed with the REDengine, which is what was used for the base game. This is the first peep we’ve heard about the Cyberpunk 2077 expansion in a while, so we’ll take it.

Details are sparse about both the next Witcher game and the Cyberpunk 2077 expansion, but hopefully this news bodes well for both of those releases.

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