The Witcher 4 targets 2028 and skips gamescom entirely

CD Projekt RED has finally named a year. The Witcher 4 is aiming at 2028. Not a month, not a date, just a year, and even that is framed as a target rather than a promise. And at gamescom, which opens tomorrow in Cologne, the game will not show up at all: no trailer, no demo, nothing on the booth.

What was actually said

On 24 August, a day before Opening Night Live, a short video went up on the official Witcher accounts. The speaker is Michal Nowakowski, one of the two joint CEOs of CD Projekt. The whole thing fits into two sentences.

While we are not showing The Witcher 4 at the event, and we are not ready to share an exact date, I can tell you this: The Witcher 4 is targeting a 2028 release window.

Michal Nowakowski, CD Projekt

He also called it the biggest, boldest and most ambitious game the studio has made. Every publisher says that about every big project, so on its own it means nothing. What does mean something: until yesterday the official line was "after 2026" and that was it. For a year and a half the answer to any question about timing was a shrug.

The only Witcher at the show is Geralt

Instead of the fourth game, CD Projekt is bringing an expansion for the third one to Cologne. It is called The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Songs of the Past, and Geralt is the lead again.

An expansion for a game that is eleven years old sounds odd right up until you open the Steam charts: tens of thousands of people are still playing The Witcher 3 at any given hour. The maths is not complicated.

Thirteen years between the third game and the fourth

The Witcher 3 came out in May 2015. If 2028 holds, thirteen years will separate it from the fourth game. Between the second and the third there were four.

A straight comparison is unfair, though. In the meantime the studio swapped its own engine for Unreal Engine 5, which for a team this size means relearning every tool from scratch. On top of that The Witcher 4 is not a continuation of Geralt story but the opening game of a new trilogy with Ciri in the lead. New protagonist, new engine, new narrative structure. That does not happen quickly, and The Blood of Dawnwalker from former Witcher developers took a similar road to release.

Why I would not put 2028 in the calendar yet

A release window is not a date. Nowakowski said in plain words that the studio does not have an exact day, and there are two and a half years and several earnings calls between now and the end of 2028.

CD Projekt has history here. Cyberpunk 2077 was delayed three times and still launched in December 2020 in a state people bring up to this day. The studio says it rebuilt its processes after that. There will be exactly one chance to verify that, and it falls in 2028.

One small detail says more than the window itself. Nowakowski promised the game will turn up at gamescom in the coming years. Which means the first real gameplay is unlikely before next August.

I still like the news. A year is something you can live with, unlike the "sometime after 2026" that has been hanging over the series. Tonight it is Opening Night Live and Geralt.