The Witcher 4 Should Release Before Next-Gen Consoles Arrive

CD Projekt RED first entered the gaming industry with The Witcher, which was released in 2007. However, many are unaware that the very next year, they launched GOG, a video game distribution platform. While GOG may not be as successful as Steam or Epic, The Witcher was a smashing success, followed by The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings and two mobile games, The Witcher Adventure Game and The Witcher Battle Arena.

CDPR announced Cyberpunk 2077 back in 2012, even before releasing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. So, by the time they launched Wild Hunt in 2015 and how well the game was, the Witcher fan base had a massive increase in numbers, and everyone was eyeing for the Cyberpunk 2077's release.

Cyberpunk 2077 took eight years of development before it was released in 2020, and CD Projekt RED's release was the most devasted, if not the most. The game was so glitchy that even PlayStation removed it from their store. How CDPR managed the situation back then is known to most of us, and they deserve full credit for it. Cyberpunk 2077 was a game ahead of time, but it was sadly released in 2020. If CDPR had released the game on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, none of that would've happened.

The issues that made its launch unsuccessful were the release on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. I played the game on PC during launch and two years later on PlayStation 5, and I thought it was one of the best games I've played that year if not the best game of all time. Every time I looked back to the release of Cyberpunk 2077 on the last-gen console, I thought that it was the biggest mistake CDPR made. Even their developers admitted that.

Fast forward to 2024, Cyberpunk 2077 has surpassed 30 million copies, and over eight million copies of Phantom Liberty DLC have been sold. This isn't really typical for a DLC to sell at such a high volume, but Phantom Liberty proved that theory wrong. And by the way, that's a massive sum except for games like Hearts of Iron or Crusader Kings III, where a game's sales are mainly dependent on DLC.

For a game similar to Cyberpunk 2077, most publishers would set a goal to achieve something a little higher than 15% of the total base game's sales because a small percentage of the base game players will really play the DLC. So, a DLC selling around 27% of the base game is a massive achievement for CD Projekt RED. So now we know why the СD Рrоjekt's СEОs and bоаrd members received multi-million-dollar bonuses despite Cyberpunk 2077's problematic launch.

CDPR is a remarkable company that has repeatedly proven their resilience. Furthermore, it has been reported that sales of The Witcher 3 are substantial. As of March 2023, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has sold more than 50 million copies, while the series has sold over 75 million copies, making it one of the most successful series in the history of the video game industry.

This is where The Witcher 4 comes in. Apart from all the rumors and speculations we've had over the past few months or years since its announcement, one question remains: Is The Witcher 4 targeting the next-generation consoles to avoid a similar blunder like Cyberpunk 2077? It has been announced that the Polaris team has completed pre-production, and The Witcher 4 is now in the most intensive phase of development, full-scale production, which began a few weeks ago.

Considering Cyberpunk 2077 took eight years from announcement to launch on last-gen consoles, and The Witcher 4 was revealed in 2022, it gives the idea that the game would take at least four years before hitting the shelves. I'm assuming this because according to many sources and even interviews from CDPR officials, the scale of The Witcher 4 is much bigger than Cyberpunk 2077 and has even more vast open-world gameplay.

Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and its two DLCs, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine, are already quite vast, and something even more is unimaginable until we really see it. Remember Elden Ring? When we played the game, we thought it was massive, and then when Shadow of the Erdtree DLC dropped, its verticality left us speechless. However, since The Witcher 4 will be more massive in scope than Cyberpunk 2077, fans are understandably concerned about how long it will take to develop.

CD Projekt RED hasn't released any major title since 2020 other than the Phantom Liberty DLC. So, in a way, it's a good sign because they might have already been working on The Wicher 4 and planning to release it before the PlayStation 6 and next Xbox console are released. This way, they don't have to worry about preparing a game for two different generations of consoles.

The next-gen consoles won't arrive until sometime in the years 2028 or 2029—if not before since both Sony and Microsoft seemed to be more worried about launching their handheld consoles. So, assuming CDPR started developing The Wicher 4 somewhere between 2020 and 2022, with a full production schedule of three to four years, we should be able to see the game in 2027. That's almost seven years of development, somewhat similar to Cyberpunk 2077.

The length of time required for full-scale production varies from game to game. Whether The Witcher 4 releases in 2027 or 2026 (if the 400+ developers can really pull this off), I hope they release it before the next-gen consoles arrive. The game would receive next-gen upgrades, nevertheless. However, it's not too far away; I'm talking about three or four years, which might be very long or very short.

However, I feel that The Witcher 4 is imminent because most Witcher fans like me have nothing else to do in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and its DLC. It's a gamer thing like the Peter-tingle we see in Spider-man. We know Project Polaris later came to be a remake of The Witcher (the first game), but whatever Project Hadar, Project Orion, and Project Sirius are, CD Projekt RED shouldn't try to do too much at a time to break the hearts of millions of Witcher fans with a disastrous launch.

My colleagues and I have been writing too much about The Witcher 4 lately because every time we discuss the most anticipated games in the coming years, The Witcher 4 comes up on top, not GTA VI or any other game.