The Witcher 4 is finally in full production: 'Ahead of us lies the main and most intense stage of development'
As part of today's CD Projekt Q3 financial update, the studio has announced that Polaris, the game we like to call The Witcher 4, is now in full production.
You can tell the shift to full production is a pretty big deal by the full-page slide used to announce the development shift in the group presentation:
"I'm pleased to announce that several weeks ago [Polaris] moved to full-scale production," CD Projekt chief financial officer Piotr Nielubowicz said. "Of all our projects, this one is currently the most far along, and we're starting the most intensive phase of development. I wish to thank the team for its effort and I'm keeping my fingers crossed for further progress."
The other projects mentioned by Nielubowicz include Orion, the sequel to Cyberpunk 2077; Sirius, the Witcher spinoff being developed by The Molasses Flood; and Hadar, which was announced in 2022 as "a third, entirely distinct IP, created from scratch," which for now remains a mystery.
In terms of who's doing what, this is how it breaks down—not a huge change from the previous financial report:
The slightly reduced number of developers on Polaris "reflects [a] natural transition as we completed the pre-production phase and adjusted the team setup to meet the current needs of the production phase," CD Projekt joint CEO Michał Nowakowski explained in today's earnings call.
"During this [pre-production] phase, we have been developing key aspects of the game including the storyline, main mechanics, and design, amongst other elements, and then tested how they work together on a playable segment," Nowakowski said, explaining what the shift to full production means in practice. "Ahead of us lies the main and most intense stage of development, which is the production phase. We'll now scale the solutions we have developed and validated thus far across the entire game."
Nowakowski expanded on that a bit further later in the call: "Now we are set on target, we know what we want to achieve within the game, and now it's a question of actually filling in the blanks. It's a super oversimplification of course, but this is really what entering the production phase means. We have a big chunk of game made that proves certain concepts, and now we can populate the whole game per plan."
There's still no sign of a release target for The Witcher 4 at this point, which isn't terribly surprising given the drawn-out shmozzle of Cyberpunk 2077. One caller during the Q&A portion of the presentation did try to suss something out by asking about the game's development timeline, earning a bit of a rebuke from Nowakowski, who said firmly, "I'm not going to answer that question, obviously"—but he also complimented the caller for asking a "very clever" question.