CD Projekt RED recently announced that it’s started working on the next new mainline The Witcher game, which will be the first in new saga for the series, while also confirming that for the new project and future titles, it’s also dropping its internal REDengine and adopting Unreal Engine 5 instead. At the same time, other details on its development are also coming through.
Recently on Twitter, CD Projekt RED’s Jason Slama – who worked on The Witcher 3 and Gwent: The Witcher Card Game – announced that he’ll be serving as the game director on The Witcher 4 (or whatever CDPR ends up calling it). In response to a tweet referring to the Polish company’s troubling history with crunch and overworking its developers, Slama took a firm stance, stating that things will be different with him as the game director. “Never on my watch,” he wrote.
CD Projekt RED, as mentioned, has a long history with crunch. The developer crunched heavily while developing The Witcher 3, after which it hoped to improve its production and management pipelines in order to avoid crunch for future projects. In May 2019, the developer said it was looking to enact new “non-obligatory” crunch policies to work towards that.
Less than a year later, however, with Cyberpunk 2077’s production ramping up, CD Projekt RED ended up mandating crunch (though overtime was, of course, paid as per Polish laws). Subsequent reports would go on to shed light on Cyberpunk 2077’s development issues and how they led to the measures taken by the studio.
As for the next The Witcher game, there’s no word yet on when it will launch, and there likely won’t be for some time. It was recently confirmed, however, that in spite of CDPR’s new strategic agreement with Epic involving Unreal Engine, the game won’t be exclusive to the Epic Games Store (or any other single storefront) on PC.