Can you believe that Witcher 4 is going to cost 800 million dollars? That’s right! CD Projekt Red is pouring around 800 million dollars into their next big RPG, making it the second most expensive game ever made, right behind GTA VI. Let’s break down that number: $800 million. That doesn’t just cover development; it […]
The Witcher IV is an upcoming action role‑playing game developed by CD Projekt Red and published by CD Projekt. It is planned as the first entry in a new trilogy in The Witcher series, itself based on Andrzej Sapkowski’s book saga, and takes place after the events of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015). Unlike the original trilogy, which starred Geralt of Rivia, this installment puts his adoptive daughter Ciri in the lead role and is planned for release on PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S.
The game is set in the open world of the Continent, where players control Ciri, a monster hunter who can traverse locations on foot or by summoning her horse, Kelpie. It adds new explorable areas, including Kovir, a region previously only referenced in earlier games and detailed in the novels.
CD Projekt Red announced work on a new Witcher title in March 2022, later revealing it under the codename “Project Polaris” as the beginning of a new trilogy. After Cyberpunk 2077, the studio overhauled its production pipeline to streamline development and improve coherence across future projects; The Witcher IV stayed in pre‑production from May 2022 until November 2024, when full production started, and by November 2025 a team of 447 people was involved. A support team from Fool’s Theory, the studio behind the remake of the 2007 Witcher, was brought in to help due to shared technology and assets.
The developers aim to keep the established canon intact so that choices from The Witcher 3 do not cause contradictions, while still making this game approachable for newcomers. They have long viewed Ciri as a natural choice for a main protagonist, emphasizing her central narrative importance alongside Geralt; in this game she is portrayed as an up‑and‑coming monster hunter defining her own code. Ciara Berkeley voices Ciri, replacing Jo Wyatt from Wild Hunt, while Doug Cockle returns as Geralt.
Game director Sebastian Kalemba has said the team wants to broaden player agency with more meaningful narrative decisions and to use lessons from Cyberpunk 2077 to improve build variety, encounter design, and the integration of main quests, side quests, and open‑world activities. Development now uses Unreal Engine 5 instead of CDPR’s in‑house REDengine, previously used for The Witcher 2 and Wild Hunt.
The Witcher IV was unveiled via a cinematic trailer at The Game Awards in December 2024, produced with animation studio Platige Image, which also created intro cinematics for earlier Witcher titles. The trailer was rendered in‑engine on a then‑unannounced GeForce RTX 5090 rather than as real‑time gameplay, and a tech demo running on PlayStation 5 was later shown during the State of Unreal presentation in June 2025. According to CD Projekt CFO Piotr Nielubowicz, the game will not launch before 2027 and is currently planned for PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S.