The Witcher 3 on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S indefinitely delayed reveals CD Projekt

The chances of a next gen version of The Witcher 3 coming out this year are looking very slim, as CD Projekt takes development in-house.

CD Projekt’s attempts to recover from the disaster of Cyberpunk 2077’s launch continues to flounder, as their long-promised next gen version of The Witcher 3 suffers another serious delay.

The Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 remasters were to have been handled by Saber Interactive, who were seen as a safe pair of hands given their work on projects such as the Crysis remasters and the surprisingly good Switch version of The Witcher 3.

Now though, for unexplained reasons, CD Projekt has announced that the remaster is being handled in-house, postponing the planned Q2 release date (i.e. between April and June) ‘until further notice’.

The brief Twitter announcement stated that CD Projekt would continue the ‘remaining work’, implying the remaster won’t be restarted from scratch, but there’s no indication of why or what the new release date (or even just year) will be.

When it was first announced in September 2020, CD Projekt promised that the new version would be a free upgrade, including all the existing DLC and next gen features like ray-tracing and super-fast loading.

Presumably that is still the idea, but none of that has been mentioned lately and there’s never been any footage or detailed information, just repeated delays.

No doubt CD Projekt is keen to avoid a repeat of Cyberpunk 2077’s launch, with the console versions being so full of bugs it severely damaged the company’s reputation… and share price.

The eventual next gen version of Cyberpunk 2077 didn’t notably help matters and while all versions of the game have been receiving a steady stream of updates it’s clearly never going to be the success that was hoped for.

Given the ongoing success of the Netflix TV show, The Witcher does seem a safer bet, although between the constant delays of the next gen versions and work on The Witcher 4 (or whatever it’ll be called) having only just begun it’s going to be a long time till there’s any sign of a new release.