Despite being a nominee for The Game Awards “Most Anticipated Game” category for next year, The Witcher 4 release will not be in 2026. Polish publisher CD Projekt Red has confirmed the new information on its latest, Q3 earnings call, reassuring everyone that the game (see here in full) didn’t have anything major happening in its development process. Basically, the whole thing is going on as smoothly as we can possibly know at the moment, it’s just not coming out next year.
This is not some journalistic interpretation either: when asked about details regarding The Witcher 4’s development cycle, CDPR’s joint CEO Michał Nowakowski stated, in no uncertain terms:
“We’re not disclosing any details regarding the target release date, so there’s not a point in time I could refer to when answering such a question. The only thing we’re commenting on is that we’re not launching in 2026, and we’re also not typically getting into any specifics regarding technical or design matters. There’s nothing out of the ordinary, I’d say, in that area happening with TW4 – it’s just full scale production proceeding at its pace, as per our internal plans. I think that’s as much as we can say.”
While no new info on the next game of the franchise was offered, CD Projekt Red has stated that The Witcher 4 will be the starting point of an entirely new trilogy — likely with Ciri as a protagonist. We know that longtime hero Geralt of Rivia will be in the game on some capacity, but not in the spotlight.
A Witcher 4 release will likely come in 2027; will be the first on a six-year-plan trilogy
Much like its predecessors, The Witcher 4 will likely feature one, long, overarching plot, connected through all of its three games. Granted, you don’t have to have the entire knowledge of the plots on both Witcher and Witcher 2 so you can play Witcher 3, but given the sheer size of the game’s canon, it certainly helps to contextualize things.
CD Projekt Red has stated in the call that it plans for a six-year-windows release pipeline for the new trilogy, so starting with The Witcher 4 (and assuming 2027 as the game’s release), we can expect The Witcher 5 and The Witcher 6 to come out sometime in 2029 and 2031, respectively.
This, once again, comes from Nowakowski, by the way:
“In a way, yes, I do believe that further games should be delivered in a shorter period of time – as we had stated before, our plan still is to launch the whole trilogy within a six-year period, so yes, that would mean we would plan to have a shorter development time between TW4 and TW5, between TW5 and TW6 and so on.”
Witcher 3: Wild Hunt reached its 60 million milestone in May, 2025, according to data from Statista — this comes 10 years after the game’s original launch in 2015. Summing up numbers from the base game plus its two overarching DLC expansions (those being Heart of Stone and Blood and Wine — the latter most likely paving the way for Geralt’s retirement of sorts).
It is a hefty number to live up to. And considering the fact that Witcher 4 will have Geralt’s protegé, Ciri, as lead character (which was already a sin according to some idiots who can’t bear to see a woman leading a story), it is kind of expected that CDPR will take time with the starting point of this new story.
Well, that, and also, they don’t want a repetition of what happened during Cyberpunk 2077’s original release, evidently…
