CD Projekt RED has announced that the next entry in The Witcher video game series is currently in development. The announcement comes in the form of a blog post on the official Witcher website. The information came with a new piece of art showing Witcher medallion covered in snow, its eyes glowing a bright red. The name The Witcher is shown beneath it joined by the phrase, "a new saga begins." It was confirmed in 2020 that the CD Projekt RED would be returning to The Witcher series after the completion of Cyberpunk 2077, with this announcement being the first details revealed about the new project.
The blog post also confirms that the upcoming title will be moving away from their in-house REDengine that they have used since The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings in 2011. They will be moving to Unreal Engine 5, the blog post explains, "beginning a multi-year strategic partnership with Epic Games." Further:
" It covers not only licensing but technical development of Unreal Engine 5, as well as potential future versions of Unreal Engine, where relevant. We'll closely collaborate with Epic Games’ developers with the primary goal being to help tailor the engine for open-world experiences."
Despite this agreement between CD Projekt RED and Epic Games, The Witcher team assured fans voicing concern about the partnership moving the title to the Epic Game Store exclusively, stating that they are "not planning on making the game exclusive to one storefront." Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic Games, provided a statement about the partnership, saying, "We are deeply honored by the opportunity to partner with CD Projekt RED to push the limits of interactive storytelling and gameplay together, and this effort will benefit the developer community for years to come."
The blog post also states that "at this point, no further details regarding the game — such as a development time frame or release date — are available." With very few details currently available about the game, the promise of "kicking off a new saga for the franchise" and the snow-covered medallion are the only real information that we can speculate about. The medallion shown not being the familiar School of the Wolf design points to the fact that we are likely moving away from Geralt with a new protagonist, which seemed to be the direction that was set up with the ending of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
The medallion depicted in the released art does not match any of the known Witcher schools that have been shown in the series, so this may be an entirely new school that we'll get to explore. It could also be a slightly modified version of the Cat School medallion, which Ciri is shown as having in The Witcher 3.
The last Witcher game from CD Projekt RED was 2015's The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which saw universal acclaim, winning 250 Game of the Year Awards. The series has also seen a surge in popularity following The Witcher Netflix series starring Henry Cavill, which currently sits at two seasons with a third one in production. The company's most recent game was 2020's Cyberpunk 2077, which still received high critical scores but was marred by extensive technical issues, especially on last-gen consoles. The game just received its next-gen update for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S last month. CD Projekt RED has also confirmed that the DLC expansion for Cyberpunk 2077 will still be using the REDengine.
There are no details of the game's story or a scheduled release window for the next video game entry in The Witcher series.