The Witcher 4 has "over 400 people" working on it already, and CD Projekt Red hasn't even entered full production yet
"We plan to move on to the production phase in the second half of the year"
The Witcher 4 - which I am once again obliged to note is only officially known by the codename Polaris - remains in pre-production, but over 400 people are already at work on the game.
"In the first quarter of 2024, we focused on further development of our projects," CFO Piotr Nielubowicz said in a video accompanying CD Projekt's latest financial results. "The largest of them - going by the size of the team, but also by the progress of ongoing work - is Polaris: the upcoming first installment in the new Witcher trilogy. Over 400 people are currently working on the game, and we plan to move on to the production phase in the second half of the year."
That's right on track with what the company said back in January, noting that it wanted 400 devs to be working on the game by the summer and confirming plans to enter full production sometime in 2024. In a slide accompanying today's financial report, CD Projekt specified that 407 developers were working on Polaris as of April 30, 2024, compared with 56 on Cyberpunk sequel Orion, 39 on Witcher spin-off Sirius, and 20 on standalone IP Hadar.
pic.twitter.com/YXZfbWZoIXMay 28, 2024
We don't know much about Polaris just yet, other than the fact that it'll be the first entry in a "new AAA RPG trilogy." All the devs have revealed so far is that the game will add "new gameplay elements and new mechanics" to differentiate it from previous series entries.
There are a whole lot of upcoming CD Projekt Red games to keep track of.
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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.