For the most part, The Witcher series is having another shot at the limelight. A remaster of The Witcher 3 is on the way later this month and a new expansion is headed our way in 2027. A year after that, CD Projekt RED expects to get The Witcher 4 out of the door.
However, there’s one Witcher project that was announced back in 2022 that’s officially been put on ice for the time being – at least until all of the other Witcher projects are out of the way first.
As confirmed by GameSpot, the remake of The Witcher is currently on hold while developer Fool’s Theory assists CD Projekt RED with development on the Songs of the Past DLC and The Witcher 4.
“Fool’s Theory team is focused mainly on the development of Witcher 3: Songs of the Past, while a relatively small part of their team is supporting the development of The Witcher 4,” the statement provided to GameSpot reads. “As we have previously announced, the development on The Witcher Remake has been temporarily integrated with The Witcher 4 due to production process dependencies.
“As The Witcher Remake will be built on the foundation laid by The Witcher 4, we need to have the necessary assets, tools, and pipelines ready for efficient development.”
The reason behind this delay seems largely down to CD Projekt’s transition from its own in-house RED Engine to Unreal Engine 5. While The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk were both built using the older engine tech, the Polish developer initiated the technology transition for development of The Witcher 4.
Speaking to The Game Business show, CEO Michał Nowakowski explains that while the transition will ultimately take a bit of time in the short run, it will hopefully allow them to transition to new projects more quickly, allowing them to work on two big games simultaneously and ultimately get new Witcher and Cyberpunk games out of the door more quickly.
Fool’s Theory, which is known for developing its own game The Thaumaturge, seems to be assisting CD Projekt RED while it makes this technology transition. The Witcher 4 will be the first game in the series to use Unreal Engine 5 with the studio working closely with Epic Games to develop new technology specifically intended for The Witcher series.
From the studio’s statement, it seems like CD Projekt RED is keen for The Witcher remake – also built in Unreal Engine 5 – to also utilise this technology. As such, Fool’s Theory will need to wait until most of the work is done on The Witcher 4 before it can proceed further with development on The Witcher remake.
Despite the seemingly indefinite delay for now, Witcher fans are hardly short on new content – and it doesn’t sound like it’s going to slow down any time soon.
The most recent studio resource allocation update from CD Projekt RED shows that most of the studio is hard at work on The Witcher 4 with around 20% of the studio working on Cyberpunk 2.
There’s also Project Sirius and Project Hadar in the works as incubation projects. One of them is rumoured to be a Witcher-themed multiplayer project with the other a brand new IP.
