The Witcher 4 Is About To Get A Big Development Boost

As part of its half-yearly financial results, CD Projekt Red has revealed new details about the state of the next game in the Witcher franchise, known internally as Polaris, which was first announced early last year. As picked up by VGC, The Witcher 4 now has over 250 developers working on it.

While CD Projekt's presentation to investors was strongly focused on Cyberpunk 2077, with the ambitious Phantom Liberty expansion due out in September, we got a glimpse of how development is going thanks to the company's breakdown of how its workforce is currently engaged.

The Phantom Liberty team is currently the largest at around 300 people, though the Polaris team has grown to almost 260 developers as of the end of July. A major change is in store once Phantom Liberty releases on September 26, with CD Projekt CEO Adam Kiciński saying, "after releasing Phantom Liberty, we will transfer a big part of the team to Polaris.”

Not much is yet known about the next mainline Witcher game, though CD Projekt said when it was announced that it would be the start of "a new saga" for the franchise. Despite the size of the game's development team, we shouldn't expect it to release until 2025 at the earliest, and even that release window seems ambitious for a game of this scope.

While Polaris is intended as the next main game in the series, CD Projekt has a number of other Witcher-related games in the works, including spin-off Project Sirius, which is being developed by Flame in the Flood developer The Molasses Flood. Also in the works are a main sequel for Cyberpunk 2077, and a brand-new IP currently known only as Project Hadar.