In an earnings call CD Projekt RED CEO Adam KiciĆski has reconfirmed the company is currently in the pre-production phase of its next The Witcher project, less likely in the light of day to be The Witcher 4 and more the beginning of a new adventure with its own multiple game arc.
"We said that there will be a new [The Witcher] saga. We have in mind more than one," he said in the call. "The first saga was three games, so now we are thinking about more than one game, but [right now] we are in pre-production of the first game from the second Witcher saga." The new project has been a talking point since it was confirmed as it also represents the studio moving away from its own internal tools, shifting to work on Unreal Engine 5 in a deal struck with Epic Games. The current thinking is that the new saga will focus on an entirely different Witcher school, which opens up the possibilities on various fronts. Netflix is about to drop The Witcher: Blood Origin which is set more than a thousand years before Geralt's timeline, so there's scope to explore the history of the world in new and previously undocumented ways. Moreover, as CDPR and Netflix chum up more and more (see Cyberpunk: Edgerunners), shifting expanded content away from Andrzej Sapkowski's stories and books allows the IP's custodians to work more closely on the brand with its own vision. Whichever the case, a planned trilogy would be a hugely significant leap up from the more of less hodgepodge trilogy we've more recently wrapped up, and could allow for some really integrated storytelling not too dissimilar to that of BioWare's Mass Effect trilogy. Stay tuned for more as we have it. |