The Game Awards are once again bearing down on us, bringing with it the usual year-ending slurry of announcements, trailers, random bits of awkwardness, and other such surprises as God and Geoff see fit. Oh, and some awards too, scattered here and there amidst the sound and fury, including one for Most Anticipated Game.
This year’s winner will be Grand Theft Auto 6—it won’t be official for a couple weeks yet, but who are we trying to kid?—but also in the running, and a likely second-place finisher, is The Witcher 4 from CD Projekt Red. That game is a pretty big deal in its own right, and given CD Projekt’s own occasional penchant for surprises (recall Keanu Reeves “breathtaking” moment at E3 2019), optimistic Witcher fans may have been hoping for a fresh look at Ciri’s big adventure at some point during the show.
“I’m very happy to see The Witcher 4 nominated in the Most Anticipated Game category at The Game Awards,” CD Projekt co-CEO Michał Nowakowski wrote on X. “Thanks to everyone who has already voted—your support means a lot to us. We won’t be bringing any new content to TGA this year, but we’re, as always, excited to watch the show and celebrate this amazing industry’s great night alongside all of you.”
I suppose there’s a chance Nowakowski is lying to us, although I think that’s very unlikely. For one thing, that’s generally just not done—it’s rude, and not great for your credibility either. But more to the point, things seem pretty quiet and steady-as-she-goes on The Witcher 4 front. CD Projekt reiterated during its Q3 earnings call earlier this week that the new Witcher remains “in the full-scale production phase,” which has been the case since November 2024, and while a release target still hasn’t been announced, it definitely won’t be out in 2026—also something we already knew.
There was one small status update I found interesting: CD Projekt said that once The Witcher 4 does arrive, we won’t have to wait so long for parts five and six. That too isn’t really new: The studio said in 2022 that the next Witcher game, then known as Project Polaris, will be first of an all-new trilogy, and that the goal was to have the whole thing rolled out within six years of Witcher 4’s release. It’s notable, though, because it seemed very optimistic at the time—CD Projekt is known for a lot of things, but short development times sure ain’t one of them—but CD Projekt said during the earnings call said the shift to Unreal Engine 5 is going very well, and the six-year plan is still on.
“I do believe that the next two games should be delivered in a short period of time,” Nowakowski said during the Q&A portion of the call in response to a question about the new trilogy’s development cadence. “Because as we have stated before, the plan still is to launch the whole trilogy within a total of a six year period. So that would mean, yes, we would plan to have shorter development time between Witcher 4 and 5, 5 and 6, and so on.”
I’m not fully convinced at this point: The original Witcher came out in 2007 and CD Projekt has released a grand total of three mainline games in the years since—and that’s with some pretty serious crunch baked into the process. Studio leadership has said in more recent years that it’s not working that way anymore, and I really hope that’s the case, but as we saw with Cyberpunk 2077, the real test will come when the pressure to meet deadlines starts to weigh heavy.
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