The announcement of The Witcher Remake and the recent confirmation that it will be redesigned to be an open world game (unlike the original) certainly stirred a lot of interest from the many fans of Sapkwoski’s fantasy world. However, it seems like the wait may be relatively long. During the Q&A portion of CD Projekt RED’s Q3 2022 earnings call, president and joint CEO Adam Kiciński revealed that The Witcher Remake would only be released after The Witcher 4 (codenamed Polaris) because it will take advantage of the technologies and tools developed for that game.
Coming back to The Witcher Remake and when it will come, yes, it will come after Polaris (The Witcher 4), which is a consequence of how we think about this project. I think that The Witcher Remake will be based in big part on technologies from Polaris, so it will be developed partially in parallel to Polaris, but once Polaris is launched, everything for Polaris will be then in the final shape, and it will be partially reused in the remake.
It makes sense, as Polaris will be the first game made by CD Projekt RED with Unreal Engine 5. As some of you might recall, the Polish studio touted a full-fledged partnership with Epic where they would also work to improve the engine’s capabilities to deliver open world roleplaying games. Of course, The Witcher Remake will be mainly developed by Fool’s Theory (the studio behind Seven: The Days Long Gone, founded by former CDPR employees), but CD Projekt RED is still expected to support the project.
While The Witcher Remake and The Witcher 4 may have the lion’s share of the hype when it comes to future projects in the franchise, CD Projekt RED is also supporting the development of a spin-off game codenamed Sirius in the works at The Molasses Flood (acquired about a year ago by the Polish company). During the aforementioned earnings call, Kiciński said it would be a very different game from the usual CDPR output, meant for a broader audience. As such, the company is keen to unveil it to gamers first before it can be discussed with investors.
We are not guiding anything about the design of Project Sirius, so we are not talking about the size or what type of game it is. We just said that the design is to be accessible to a broader audience. There is a very clear business purpose through it because we have to prepare ourselves in the right moment to communicate the product to gamers, as the product is very different from anything we’ve released so far. We have to be sure that gamers first will understand properly what the game is about. That’s why we are not saying anything, and we are not describing what type of game and what kind of size the game is.
Lastly, Kiciński would not say whether Project Sirius or Project Polaris will be released first, leaving that to anyone’s guess for the time being. While we wait for new The Witcher games, the Next-Gen edition of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is right around the corner, and Cyberpunk 2077’s expansion Phantom Liberty is nearly done, suggesting a launch window in the first half of 2023.
The post The Witcher Remake Is Coming After The Witcher 4, Will Take Advantage of Its Technologies by Alessio Palumbo appeared first on Wccftech.
