In a mid-yearly earnings call, developer CD Projekt Red has discussed the future of The Witcher franchise, including how progress on the The Witcher 3‘s ‘next gen’ ports for Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 is going. According to president and joint CEO of the company Adam Kiciński, these ports are well on track, and will still release in Q4 2022.
The upgrades were originally set to launch in 2021 before being delayed twice, to account for much-needed work on Cyberpunk 2077 and pandemic-era difficulties. They were previously in development at Saber Interactive, but were later moved in-house due to unspecified reasons.
When the ‘next gen’ versions of the game launch, they will be free to everyone who already owns a last-gen copy. They will also come packaged with DLC content inspired by Netflix’s The Witcher.
Read: The next Witcher game has officially been announced
Further into the call, CD Projekt Red also discussed the far-off future of The Witcher franchise. It was already announced that a new game was in development, but the developer has now confirmed the potential for even more Witcher games to be released in the next era of the popular franchise.
‘We have in mind more than one [game],’ Kiciński said, per VGC. ‘The first saga was three games, so now we are thinking about more than one game, but we are in pre-production of the first game from the second Witcher saga.’
Not much is known about plans for the franchise beyond the next major, blockbuster title – but there’s certainly room for more stories to be told. These could come in the form of spin-offs – like the excellent card battler Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales – or in large-scale sequels.
While CD Projekt Red isn’t quite ready to talk about what comes next, it did confirm in the earnings call that the next Witcher will be developed in Unreal Engine 5, rather than its proprietary REDengine, which has likely been tarnished by the Cyberpunk 2077 saga.
At this stage, fans can look forward to hearing more about the next saga in the coming months. In the meantime, the ‘next gen’ version of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is expected to land later in 2022.
