The Witcher 4 'is nearing a major milestone' and will soon enter full production

CD Projekt's 2024 half-year financial report is out, and there's not a whole lot to see for anyone who isn't a major shareholder in the company. But there is one thing that's of interest to non-investing gamer types: The Witcher 4 is just about ready to move into full production.

"Work on Polaris is progressing," CD Projekt joint CEO Michał Nowakowski said in a press release. "Its development team is nearing a major milestone which will mark the end of the preproduction phase.

"The first half of the year was also a busy period for our Boston studio, which is laying the groundwork for Project Orion—a new game set in the Cyberpunk universe."

"Polaris" is the codename for "a new saga in the Witcher franchise," which CD Projekt insisted for an entire year was not called The Witcher 4—until then-CEO Adam Kiciński blabbed in March 2023 that, yes, Polaris is in fact The Witcher 4. 

Of course, that's not necessarily the official title for it, and CD Projekt has studiously avoided using that term for it in subsequent communications. But it has acknowledged that Polaris is "the next game in The Witcher saga," and since there have been three previous games in the series, the next one is the fourth. You just can't deny the logic.

The breakdown of who's doing what at CD Projekt is virtually unchanged from the previous report—some small upticks in the Witcher spinoff (Sirius) and a new IP (Hadar), but nothing particularly notable—but chief financial officer Piotr Nielubowicz said in an earnings recap video that a lot has happened over the first half of 2024. 

"The Polaris team, working on the next game in The Witcher saga, made substantial progress, which will soon enable us to wrap up pre-production and take this project to the full production phase.

"The past six months were also a busy time for our new studio in Boston. There, a group of CD Projekt veterans, now assisted by freshly hired talented developers, is laying the groundwork for another Cyberpunk game, codenamed Orion."

It's worth managing expectations here. CD Projekt has previously said The Witcher 4 is in the "most advanced" state of development among the games it currently has in progress, but it's still not quite in full production at this point—and even once that kicks fully into gear, it's going to be a good while before we actually have anything to play. And how long is "a good while," you wonder? Someone actually asked that question in today's investors call, and unsurprisingly CD Projekt declined to pin itself down.

"The answer to that question really differs from game to game, in general, because there are triple-A games I'm pretty sure that are made around three years and then there are games that have been in production for a very long time," Nowakowski (I think) said. "Historically for us, we've been launching our games—from the moment we start till the moment we launch—in about four or five-ish [years] period of time."

As for whether Polaris might take more or less time than usual (whatever "usual" is) to complete, he said nothing really comes to mind: "It's got every tool possible at its disposal to just progress the regular path."

Three years from now puts us into 2027, which is a long way off, but it could be a lot worse: CD Projekt's last game, Cyberpunk 2077, was announced in 2012 and took eight years to come out—and another three years before it was actually good. Bottom line? Be happy it's happening, and don't expect much more than brief reminders in quarterly financial reports for at least your next two birthdays.