If you were hoping for a quick return to the Continent, CD Projekt Red is urging a little more patience—but for a very good reason. Speaking at the International Festival of Comics and Games in Łódź, joint CEO Adam Badowski shed some light on why The Witcher 4 (Project Polaris) is locked into a distant 2028 release window. According to Badowski, the studio isn’t interested in chasing seasonal gaming trends. Instead, the long development cycle is fueled by a relentless obsession with the script. The narrative team is frequently tearing up and rewriting story beats to ensure that the game’s signature, ambiguous choices leave a genuinely lasting scar on the player rather than feeling like hollow window dressing.
With Ciri firmly at the helm of this new northern saga in Kovir, the focus is entirely on consequences that will haunt players long after the credits roll.
To pull this off, CDPR is aggressively consolidating its resources. The studio recently confirmed that The Witcher 1 Remake has been put on hold. Its development team at Fool’s Theory is being absorbed into two immediate priorities: pushing Project Polaris forward and finalizing next year’s massive The Witcher 3 expansion, Songs of the Past. The remake will essentially wait on the sidelines until the tools and pipelines for the fourth game are fully built.
The silver lining in all this waiting? We are only days away from The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered, launching as a massive, free upgrade on September 29, 2026. This isn’t just a simple texture pack or a frame-rate bump. CDPR is completely modernizing the core mechanics of the 11-year-old RPG, overhauling combat precision, movement fluidness, enemy pathfinding, and completely rebuilding the progression system so you can experiment with distinct character builds right from the opening hours. It’s also landing natively on the Nintendo Switch 2 and making a surprise debut on Blizzard’s Battle.net launcher.
The wait for the next chapter is going to be long, but Geralt’s modernized swan song should keep us plenty busy on the Path!