CD Projekt Red has confirmed during its latest earnings conference that production on The Witcher 4, codenamed "Polaris," will begin later this year. It has been in the pre-production phase since May of last year when CD Projekt Red had wrapped up its research phase.
The studio revealed that 403 developers are now working on "Polaris," which was CD Projekt Red's target goal. Last November, there were around 330 developers working on the project, making it CDPR's biggest development team.
“The Polaris team, on the other hand, has grown to over 400 developers reaching its target size for entering the production phase" joint CEO Michał Nowakowski revealed during the earnings call. "This is scheduled for the second half of the year.”
"Polaris" is the fourth mainline Witcher game and will be the start of a new trilogy series. It was first announced back in March 2022. While we don't have too many details about the new game, CD Projekt Red has confirmed that it will be built using Unreal Engine 5 instead of the studio's own REDengine that was used for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Cyberpunk 2077.
There's no release date for The Witcher 4 yet, but CD Projekt CEO Adam Kiciński acknowledged in October 2022 that the game was at least still three years away. Nowakowski said it could even take four or five years before it releases. This would put the game's launch anywhere between 2025 (which seems unlikely) and 2027.
The first Witcher game is also getting a remake which will modernize the gameplay and remove some of the more dated elements.
As of right now, CD Projekt Red boasts 627 developers. With 403 working on "Polaris," the remaining developers are split between other projects at the studio. Cyberpunk 2077 has just 17 developers working on it, while "Orion" has 47, "Sirius" has 37, and "Hadar" has 20.
Project "Sirius" is the codename for The Witcher spin-off game being developed by The Molasses Flood with support from CDPR. Not much is known about the game, but there were reports that ti would offer multiplayer gameplay on top of a single-player experience with a campaign. In March 2023, CDPR announced that the game's development had been rebooted.
As a whole, The Witcher series has been CD Projekt Red's most successful franchises with over 75 million units sold as of March 2023. Of those sales, around 50 million were of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.