The Witcher 3’s next-gen update should still release this year

Earlier this week, CD Projekt Red announced that The Witcher 3's next-gen update was delayed, leading to a lot of doom and gloom headlines stating the update was delayed “indefinitely”. This came up during CD Projekt's earnings call last night, with the company downplaying the severity of the delay. 

During the investors call, CD Projekt VP of business development, Michał Nowakowski, addressed the headlines saying: “I've been looking at the headlines that popped up here and there over the internet, and I've seen one that really drew my attention, which is, ‘Witcher 3 next-gen delayed indefinitely,' which sounds like the game is in some sort of development hell”.

Fortunately, it sounds like the delay isn't quite that serious: “I want to state this is not the fact. There's been a lot of insinuations that we're going to launch, like, June next year or something like that. That's completely not the case”, he added.

The next-gen update for The Witcher 3 is coming to Xbox Series X/S, PS5 and PC, promising a graphical overhaul, ray-tracing and other improvements. Initially, the update was being developed by Saber Interactive, which also handled The Witcher 3's Nintendo Switch port. However, due to unspecified reasons, CD Projekt Red chose to bring development in-house and take Saber off the project. The update was being planned for Q2 and should be close to finished already, so CD Projekt is “evaluating” the state of the update and what still needs to be done before giving a new release date. Nowakowski finished off by saying that “nobody's saying the game is delayed with some monumental time gap ahead”.

As PCGamer points out, CD Projekt's CEO, Adam Kicinski also added that finishing up the update will only require a small team, so it won't have an impact on other projects, like the Cyberpunk 2077 expansion and the next Witcher game.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: I'd be surprised if this update wasn't out sometime this summer, but we've seen delays before. For now, we'll just have to sit back and wait for further updates. 

Become a Patron!