In a quarterly earnings call on Wednesday, game developers CD Projekt Red confirmed that over 250 of its staff are currently working on the next main entry in “The Witcher” video game franchise.
Codenamed ‘Polaris’ and first revealed last year, the new game is said to be “built on the legacy of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt” and plans to be the beginning of an all-new Witcher trilogy. All three games of this new trilogy are aiming to be delivered over a six-year period after ‘Polaris’ comes out.
Today, the company provided an update on how the development of the project is going. They indicated that “the Polaris team has grown to almost 260 developers at the end of July” says CD Projekt CEO Adam Kicinski.
However, that team is about to expand considerably. Right now, the company also has around 300 people working on ‘Phantom Liberty’ – the one and only planned expansion for the sci-fi RPG title “Cyberpunk 2077”.
Once that title releases on September 26th, they will transfer a big part of the team to the Polaris project and thus ramp up the speed of development on the next “The Witcher” game.
The new game is being built with Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5, rather than its proprietary Red Engine, which powered its previous titles.
They explain that’s the main reason ‘Phantom Liberty’ will be the only expansion of “Cyberpunk 2077” being released because it will be the last time they’re working with the Red Engine. Once it is done and out, they are switching full-time over to Unreal.
Source: VGC
