Everything we know about Witcher 4, so far

Now we’re coming to the end of the summer showcases for 2024, it’s clear that one game was absent from all the celebrations, and with good reason. The Witcher 4 is nowhere near ready to show for CD Projekt Red, however, it’s in the back of our minds and maybe we’ll get a sneak peek before the year ends.

How excited can we get for a new Witcher game that feels so far away? We know the game is on the way, but what do we know about The Witcher 4 so far?

Codename Polaris

Back in October 2022, CD Projekt Red announced that an internal codename ‘Witcher Polaris’ was being used for the next instalment in the Witcher franchise. Accompanying this update was a note to say that the game was beginning ‘pre-production’ and that it would be the “beginning of a new saga.”

Witcher 3

This wasn’t the only Witcher news on the day; CDPR also said, “We aim to release two more Witcher games after Polaris, creating a new AAA RPG trilogy.”

A further update came in May of 2024 to say that the “research phase” for The Witcher 4 had come to an end and, at the time, the company split its workforce across Polaris and the Phantom Liberty DLC for Cyberpunk 2077. On an earnings call in March 2024, it was noted that over 400 people were working on The Witcher 4, this number has risen since.

The engine, development, and release date

CD Projekt Red has generally always worked on its own engine - REDengine - but it has been noted that The Witcher 4 will be created on Unreal Engine 5. With Unreal Engine 5 becoming the ‘go-to’ platform for AAA development, we already know it’s going to look wonderful, but the change will impact the development time of the game as CDPR adapts and we have a quote from joint-CEO Adam Kiciński who all but confirmed a long development cycle saying, “For this project, for sure we need some extra effort to deliver.”

Witcher 3

With this in mind, we could be looking for the game to launch on the next batch of consoles in several years. There is no definitive date or even a window for when it might come out, and a comment from Adam Kiciński confirmed it when he was asked if it was likely that Polaris would take longer than three years to develop and he replied, “Yes, it is.”

Will it be called The Witcher 4?

This is hard to say. As far as we know, this is the first part in a planned trilogy of games. So, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to call it The Witcher 4 as it likely won’t continue on from Geralt’s story. There was even a tweet from CD Projekt Red Global PR Director, Radek Grabowski, saying, “What we have NOT announced today: A game called The Witcher 4.” However, in a recent earnings call joint-CEO Adam Kiciński did refer to Polaris as The Witcher 4.

Witcher 3

In the days following the call, CDPR did correct its own CEO by saying, “This was actually a slip of the tongue. Polaris will be the first game in a new Witcher saga. The saga will consist of three games."

If we go back further than this year, it has been said by various members of CDPR that the first three Witcher games are a trilogy, which gives it a definitive endpoint. While the company has the rights to the Witcher name and has spent many years building the brand, so there’s no reason the next game won’t be called The Witcher, and then feature a subtitle to start the new trilogy off.

The story and main character

You’re not going to like me saying this, but it’s hard to say. Okay, okay, so we have a very vague idea of what might happen in Polaris and who might take on the central role of Witcher. When CD Projekt Red first announced work had begun on the game, they did so alongside an image of a Witcher medallion partly buried in snow. The medallion was from the School of the Lynx and this was confirmed by CD Projekt Red's global communication director Robert Malinowski.

Witcher 4

Interestingly, the School of the Lynx has rarely appeared in more than footnotes, but it has mostly appeared in fan fiction. It has been posited that the School of the Lynx is set up by Ciri, combining her School of the Cat with Geralt’s School of the Wolf, creating the image of a Lynx.

Even when the writers of the new game have spoken to the press they have, of course, been very tight-lipped. So, everything here is purely speculation, but if the above theory is to be believed, we might be seeing Ciri take the lead role in the game perhaps as she puts together her school.