Adding to The Witcher 4, announced earlier this year, the announcement raises the total count to five games in the future.
Development on the second and third instalments in Polaris will benefit from initially laid groundwork
Photo Credit: CD Projekt Red
The Witcher franchise is expanding with a new set of games in the near future. During its Group Strategy Update stream, held Tuesday, CD Projekt Red went on an announcement spree, confirming four new additions to the fantasy series. The entries include a new trilogy codenamed project Polaris, a full-fledged role-playing game called Canis Majoris, and Sirius, which brings an online multiplayer component to the beloved monster hunting game. The next three launches in CD Projekt Red's pipeline will belong to The Witcher franchise, with pre-production underway on two projects. With this announcement, we now have five Witcher games to look forward to in the future.
Built on the legacy of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Polaris is the beginning of a new saga in the series, further expanding upon the AAA open-world storytelling. The new Witcher trilogy is intended to be released within a six-year period, following the launch of the first in the series. While the statement does sound bold and daunting, CD Projekt Red president and CEO Adam Kiciński claims that his team has a solid plan on how to achieve it.
“Both the second and third instalments will, in technological terms, benefit from the groundwork laid during the development of Polaris,” he said. This would help smoothen the development process, with ample free-to-use assets in the latter games. The publisher had previously unveiled the first of the said saga, earlier this year, stating that it will be ditching its in-house RED Engine toolkit for Unreal Engine 5 — thanks to its new, long-term partnership with Epic Games.
Boston-based The Molasses Flood studio will lead development on project Sirius, with direct support from the CD Projekt Red team. “It will differ from our past productions, in the sense that it is targeted at a broader audience,” Kiciński explained. Currently, in pre-production, the game adds a multiplayer element to The Witcher franchise, via this instalment. That said, a single-player campaign will be at its core in project Sirius. The publisher also has plans to incorporate multiplayer in most of their new games.
The final project, codenamed “Canis Majoris,” will be another “full-fledged,” story-driven open-world The Witcher title. It will be created by an unnamed, external team, headed by “experienced developers who have worked on earlier Witcher games.”
On Tuesday, CD Projekt Red also announced a sequel to its dystopian future-set Cyberpunk 2077. Codenamed “Orion,” the project is still in early development, and aims to “take the Cyberpunk franchise further and continue harnessing the potential of this dark future universe.” A project of such scale requires strength, and therefore, the company is opening a new hub in Boston, US. The studio will work in tandem with CD Projekt Red's existing Vancouver studio to build the sequel. Collectively, they form the company's North American division.
Further news on the future of The Witcher franchise will be revealed in time. In the meantime, CD Projekt Red still plans to deliver the new-gen — PS5 and Xbox Series S/X — versions of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, sometime this year.
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