You Might Be Playing The Witcher 5 and 6 Sooner Than You Think
It might take some witchcraft to pull this off.
The original Witcher trilogy took CD Projekt Red eight long years to complete. And for its newly announced sequel trilogy, the storied developer is looking to wrap Ciri’s saga in a fraction of the time it took to tell Geralt’s story, according to studio leadership.
During an earnings call with investors Wednesday morning, CD Projekt Red co-CEO Michal Nowakowski said that once the development of The Witcher 4 is completed, the plan is to follow up with its two sequel chapters within six years of its release.
“At this moment in time, we see nothing that would prove this goal to be impossible,” Nowakowski said. “Our experience of working with [Unreal Engine 5] is actually pretty good. We’re progressing as planned.”
“Any hiccups that we can encounter, we’re able to straighten out ourselves and sometimes with support from the Epic team,” he continued. “So nothing changes in terms of our outlook towards the frequency of releases in the Witcher trilogy.”
Nowakowski’s statement betrays confidence and ambition that doesn’t quite align with what we’ve come to expect in the modern era of AAA game development. Most follow-ups take upwards of four to five years to make these days. Sequels like Ragnarok and Spider-Man 2 each took around that time to complete. Call of Duty games release after a four-year dev cycle. And Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom came six years after Breath Of The Wild.
And that’s when production goes according to plan, or if the team’s scope doesn’t change. Grand Theft Auto 6 is coming seven years after Rockstar’s last game and an astronomical 12 years after GTA 5. Dragon Age: The Veilguard took a decade to release after mix-ups and changes behind the scenes. And who knows when we’ll see The Elder Scrolls 6 from Bethesda Game Studios.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard was a sequel ten years in the making.
Unreal Engine 5 has been lauded for having developer-friendly tools that could smooth over the production woes of working with more proprietary tech. But I can’t help but do a double-take when I hear leadership talk about making a far-off sequel to an open-world role-playing game larger than The Witcher 3 in just three years. No amount of clever asset reuse would make me confident in that bet, considering the ambition of the average CD Project Red game.
In the off-chance that CD Projekt Red does pull this off, it would be a shocking break from what most players have accepted. But I don’t see them hitting this miraculously target without some concessions.
The closest comparison point I can think of is the Mass Effect Trilogy. Both sequels were released a little over two years after the preceding game, with a slight reduction in scope after the first game, and a pivot to more approachable, linear gameplay. I’m totally in favor of a similar trajectory for The Witcher, so long as it doesn’t sacrifice the writing and role-playing mechanics that have made the series so special.
Mass Effect is one of the last times a big-budget video game trilogy managed to wrap up in less than six years.
But even that was over a decade ago, when even the biggest games were cheaper and quicker to make.
CD Projekt Red has staffed up considerably since its last game, Cyberpunk 2077. The company has several projects in production right now, including a sequel to Cyberpunk 2077, a remake of the first Witcher game, and a newly announced collaboration with Pokémon Go owner Scopely. For now, the award-winning developer is focused on getting The Witcher 4 out the door sometime after 2026, according to its recent conference call.
