The next mainline Witcher game, codenamed Polaris, will emphasise freedom while upping the intensity of gameplay, CD Projekt Red has said.
Speaking to Lega Nerd, game director Sebastian Kalemba said CD Projekt Red is looking to build upon the elements Witcher fans know and love while pushing the boundaries of what a role-playing game can be.
“We have some elements of the lore that need to be kept, as the universe is always the same and we cannot go beyond certain limits. We must therefore follow a very specific direction while innovating,” Kalemba said.
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“Our priority is to try to do something that always goes beyond the limits; we want to go further. We want to try to do something new compared to what we already see in RPGs,” he added. “The idea is indeed to build something that goes beyond the previous The Witcher and that manages to tell something more intense, with also more intense gameplay.”
CD Projekt Red is also incorporating lessons learned from Cyberpunk 2077, as Kalemba said the combination of strong story-telling and player freedom is something it wants to bring forward into Polaris.
Alongside hard-wired story moments, “the player must also be able to have freedom, feel like they are free,” he said. “Starting from the construction of the character, our pressure point is immersion. It is about the possibility of choosing your own path. Also the build, obviously, because being an RPG the player must be able to build their character as he sees fit. The Witcher will follow this structure: lots of freedom, but there is a specific path to follow from a narrative point of view.”
It will be a while before get to taste this freedom and narrative for themselves, as Polaris is still two years away at the absolute earliest according to an October 2022 comment from CD Projekt Red CEO Adam Kiciński. The game was only announced in March 2022, however, so a 2025 estimate could be on the earlier side of this assessment.
Chief commercial officer Michał Nowakowski also said at the time that creating a new game alongside new technology like CD Projekt Red is doing with Polaris and Unreal Engine 5 usually takes four or five years, though this won’t necessarily be the case this time.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.