It may have been the biggest trauma in the company’s recent history, but it left a lasting mark on CD Projekt Red’s development. To avoid a repeat of Cyberpunk 2077’s disastrous launch issues on consoles, The Witcher 4’s development team is pursuing an entirely different concept. As co-executive Michał Nowakowski revealed in a recent interview, the studio is no longer leaving anything to chance: the new Witcher adventure is already playable on all target platforms at the current stage of development.
The events of 2020 have had a lasting impact on creators. At the time, CD Projekt Red was very focused on the PC version during the production of Cyberpunk 2077. Internally, management mistakenly believed that graphics performance could easily be reduced to consoles shortly before release, ultimately resulting in an unplayable version on PS4 and Xbox One. Nowakovsky admits that even with The Witcher 3, in retrospect, the console optimizations were just “lucky” in places.
The management team has now drawn harsh conclusions from these mistakes and fundamentally reorganized work processes. Co-CEO Nowakowski said that if you visit the company’s development studio now, you can access and launch an in-house build of The Witcher 4 directly on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X.
Instead of deferring technical flaws or performance issues on the console version until the end of the development period, we now use a rigorous testing process. If a feature causes lag or errors on one platform, development of new content will stop until the issue is resolved on all systems. This way, teams can prevent a mountain of optimization debt from piling up over many months.
The new beginning was supported by engine replacement. For the next Epic, the studio will bid farewell to its own RED engine and instead rely on Epic’s Unreal Engine 5. This modern architecture makes it easier for developers to optimize in parallel for different hardware platforms. Although The Witcher 4 is currently targeting an internal release in 2028, the early focus on console performance will hopefully give the studio enough time to deliver a stable and largely bug-free experience.
