The Witcher 4 will enter its production phase this year, and CD Projekt Red confirms it won’t be using AI to replace developers

CD Projekt wants 400 people working on Polaris by the middle of 2024

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The Witcher 4 is set to enter its production phase during 2024, with plans for 400 developers to be working on the game by the summer.

Speaking toReuters,CD Projekt Redco-CEO Adam Badowski said that “we’d like to have around 400 people working on the project by the middle of the year.”

While not officially titledThe Witcher 4yet, CDPR confirmed the existence of the project, codenamed Polaris, back in October 2022. Since then, there have been minimal updates on the game, though the developer did confirm that"the largest part" of its team was working on Polaris back in November.

That suggests that increasing numbers of CD Projekt Red employees are moving away fromCyberpunk 2077and onto The Witcher 4.That lines up with both CDPR’s investor reportsand the fact that work on its sci-fi RPG is largely expected to be winding down after the release of its acclaimed Phantom Liberty expansion late last year.

While the studio seems to be scaling up its efforts on The Witcher 4, Badowski’s co-CEO, Michal Nowakowski, stated that while it’s looked at the potential use of AI in its development pipeline, any work used will likely not be visible to players: “We think that AI is something that can help improve certain process in game production, but not replace people.”

Elsewhere, Badowski reaffirmed the suggestion that the team has learned its lessons from the difficult 2020 release of Cyberpunk 2077, a message that has been oft-repeated since CD Projekt began the process of reversing that game’s initial poor reception.

The Witcher 4 is the first entry in an entire new trilogy, but that’s just one aspect of a swathe ofupcoming CD Projekt Redgames expected in the coming years. Those include aCyberpunk 2077 sequeland multiple Witcher spin-offs. There’s no release date confirmed for the new Witcher saga, but CDPR has suggested that once the first game launches, the other two planned games in the trilogy will release within six years.

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I’m GamesRadar’s news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I’ve run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam’s latest indie hit.

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