Developer CD Projekt Red intends to launch the new Witcher trilogy of games featuring Ciri as the main protagonist within a 6 year timeframe which means after The Witcher 4 comes out, Witcher 5 and Witcher 6 may be back-to-back releases with only a year or two in between. During the studio’s recent financial call, joint CEO Michał Nowakowski has stated that future games in The Witcher series could take “a shorter period of time” to arrive.
“We’ve been using UE5 for The Witcher 4 for almost four years now, and we’re very happy with what we’ve achieved. I think you could have seen some of that with your own eyes with our tech demo reveal at Unreal Fest couple of months ago, and we’re very happy with the results of that as well – we’ve already said that, but I’m always happy to say it again – and we’re happy with how the engine is evolving through the Epic team’s efforts, and how we are learning how to make it work within a huge open-world game, as TW4 is meant to be.”
“In a way, yes, I do believe that further games should be delivered in a shorter period of time — as we had stated before, our plan still is to launch the whole trilogy within a six-year period, so yes, that would mean we would plan to have a shorter development time between TW4 and TW5, between TW5 and TW6 and so on.”
As CD Projekt will be using the same Unreal Engine 5 for all future Witcher titles, it will surely help streamline a lot of development elements which could indeed result in a much shorter time between the new games. However, it also seems that the main overarching narrative of the new Witcher trilogy is being developed in parallel, which will help shorten the span of development of the later two entries after The Witcher 4.
In other news related to The Witcher 4, developer CD Projekt Red has recently acquired 50 new developers and a sizable part of that workforce will likely be allotted to Witcher 4, which also suggests the enormous scale of the project.
