The Witcher 4's most optimistic release date is still so far I could cry

The Witcher fans are currently in maximum cope overdrive at the moment, following discussion of The Witcher 4’s potential release date.

There have been a bunch of threads over the past few months on the topic of The Witcher 4’s release date, like this one on r/thewitcher3 in which several people theorised that the next game in the franchise likely won’t see release until 2030 at the earliest.

As CD Projekt RED had stated in the image featured in the post, Polaris (the current title for The Witcher 4) was only in the “pre-production” stage at that point in time.

Naturally, people weren’t too thrilled about this. This reply from user No-Albatross6471, which simply features a GIF of a bloke looking off into the distance, should probably sum up how fans of the series felt about this potential release window.

The Witcher 3 will have to continue to keep us sustained.

There have been hundreds more threads like this since then, with most theorising that they’ll hopefully see The Witcher 4 sometime before they have to start claiming their pensions.

But is there any basis for this speculation? “Pre-production” can mean anything from “We’re thinking about thinking about it” to “We’re ready to start now”, so how can we know for sure?

As detailed in a news post by PC Gamer’s Andy Chalk, CD Projekt’s associate director Pawel Sasko stated on the Flow Games podcast that The Witcher 4 will officially enter production sometime in 2024.

Sasko specifically stated that Polaris “will enter production this year”, before production begins on both The Witcher Remake and The Witcher Sirius. He also referred to The Witcher 4 as “the most advanced of all of those” titles in terms of pre-production.

Development cycles for big AAA games like these can really take anywhere from a couple of years to almost a decade, depending on several different extenuating factors (like, for instance, if a publisher decides they want to force a half-baked product out of the door before it’s ready).

I reckon we will see it before 2030, but that’s just me. Would be nice to play it before my eyesight starts to fade in my later years at least. On the plus side, if it does come out in 2030, I’ll have something to do while I’m chilling in a nursing home.