The Witcher 4 dev says it takes 5-6 years to make a game after the idea's conception - but isn't saying when The Witcher 4 was thought up
There's been a lot of anticipationaround The Witcher 4 -and the rest of CD Projekt Red now that it has multiple projects in the pipeline for The Witcher and Cyberpunk franchises — and understandably, people also want to know when they can expect to play these new games.
During a recent end-of-year earnings call focusing on the developer's performance in 2024 and what's ahead, CDPR leadership, including Joint Chief Executive Officer Michał Nowakowski, gave some insight on the development timeline for their games, starting from the early talks of a project to full development. This gives us some insight into just how long it takes for CDPR to work on their large-scale games such as The Witcher 4 and the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel.
"From the very investigating ideas stage, so really when the first couple of people went into a room and say "hey, how about we make the next Witcher game," that's how long it takes – from the moment they start working on the paper and not going into what we call production phase in our vocabulary when talking about games," said Nowakowski. "So when we start discussing ideas for the game, we start providing for development of these games. But it's not 3 to 5 years of development, but more like 5 to 6 years of development -- I want to clarify that point."
This earnings call has announced that the next core entry in the Witcher series – codenamed Polaris – has entered full production following its pre-production phase, which focused on conceptualizing the scope and building up resources for the project. However, when asked during the call when Polaris, in particular, started its conceptualizing phase, Nowakowski sidestepped from providing an answer.
"I'm not going to answer that question, obviously, because that would be leading to pointing out a date, which we're not doing, but thank you, that was a very clever way to ask that question," said Nowakowski.
Currently, CDPR and its divisions have several projects on their slate. The core CDPR development team is working on the next Witcher game, while the newly established studio in Boston is working on the next Cyberpunk game – under the codename Orion.
Along with these two core games, there's an upcoming full remake of the original Witcher in the works, in addition to the next game from developer The Molasses Flood (acquired by CDPR in 2021) set in the Witcher universe that will focus on single player and multiplayer gameplay. Furthermore, there's also an entirely original game not tied to either Witcher or Cyberpunk in the works.
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