CD Projekt Red confirmed that over 250 developers are working on the next Witcher installment during an earnings call on Wednesday.
This comes from VGC who wrote on the update provided by CDPR during their earnings call when the developer was asked about the current team sizes working on current and future projects.
Currently, the largest team is working on the Phantom Liberty expansion for CyberPunk 2077, but after the release of Phantom Liberty, things will change. CD Projekt CEO Adam Kiciński confirmed this when asked about the team size, and he answered; “At the end of July, the Phantom Liberty team working on the pre-release phase consisted of 300 people. That’s fewer than at the end of 2022, but it still it remains our biggest team. On the other hand, the Polaris team has grown to almost 260 developers at the end of July.” Additionally, Project Polaris was hinted in October 2022 to be the next installment, which at the time was still in pre-production.
News of a Witcher game first surfaced in March 2022, with CDPR announcing the development of new games and expansions, utilizing Unreal Engine 5 instead of CDPR’s in-house proprietary Red Engine, which fueled past Witcher games and Cyberpunk 2077.
Kiciński follows up with his statement that after the release of Phantom Liberty, most of the team working on the expansion will be transferred to Project Polaris. As for Phantom Liberty, the expansion is currently set to release on September 26th, alongside Update 2.0, the long-awaited overhaul update to the base game that promises to overhaul the AI, police, combat, a new perk system and more.
Unfortunately, CDPR confirmed in the earnings call that Phantom Liberty would be the only story expansion for Cyberpunk 2077. Michał Nowakowski, the SVP of Business Development at CDPR said in the earnings call that this decision is based on a technological decision since the team would be shifting from the Red Engine to Unreal Engine 5.