Bet On 2027 For The Witcher 4 — CDPR’s Silence Speaks Volumes

It has been a minute since we last had a mainline Witcher game, and by minute I mean almost a decade. CD Projekt Red still has not slapped a date on The Witcher 4, but all the official breadcrumbs point to one very reasonable answer: 2027. Not locked, not promised, just… the year that makes the most sense.

Why 2027 is the smart bet

• CDPR announced a brand-new Witcher trilogy back in 2022 under the codename Polaris and said all three games would land within six years. That is an aggressive plan in modern AAA, to put it mildly.
• In a late-November 2025 financial briefing, co-CEO Michal Nowakowski said the six-year plan still stands and confirmed The Witcher 4 hit full-scale production in November 2024.
• By now, the team has been in proper production for a year and has ramped to roughly 450 developers. That lines up with the classic big-RPG five-year cycle.
• CDPR told investors in 2024 that Polaris would not launch before 2027. Translation: 2026 is off the table.
• CFO Piotr Nielubowicz also noted the game sits outside the company incentive program that ends December 2026. Again, not a 2026 play.
• They have moved the franchise to Unreal Engine 5 and have been building out their open-world pipeline on it for almost four years, which should help them move faster between entries once the first one ships.

Put all that together and the earliest realistic window is 2027. Could it slip? Always. Is 2027 the obvious target based on what CDPR itself has laid out? Also yes.

So, who are we playing as this time?

The studio has been cagier about dates than direction. The Witcher 4 pivots to Ciri as the lead. She is getting a new voice actor, and the story follows the ending where she survives The Witcher 3 and actually chooses the witcher life. CDPR is also baking that into the lore in a concrete way: Ciri has completed the Trial of the Grasses, so she is a full witcher now, and her wilder powers from the last game have been toned down. Geralt fans, do not panic — he is in the game, just not in the driver seat.

The tech shift is real (and already on display)

CDPR ditched its in-house tech for Unreal Engine 5 and has spent years customizing UE5 for a massive open world. We got a look at that work during the State of Unreal 2025 demo, which showed off a dense region, smoother traversal, and lighting that finally makes The Continent feel like somewhere you would actually freeze to death. It was a tech demo, sure, but a convincing one.

What this means for the trilogy plan

If The Witcher 4 hits in 2027, the six-year trilogy goal becomes challenging but not impossible. The bet is that the heavy lifting happens now — tools, workflows, world systems — and entries five and six come faster because of it. Ambitious? Definitely. But after a year of full production and a few hundred developers deep, the schedule math checks out more than it has at any point since Polaris was announced.

Bottom line: CDPR is not promising 2027, but their own timeline basically does. If 2026 is out and they want three games in six years, 2027 feels like the clean return to The Continent — this time through Ciri's eyes.