The Witcher 4: Ciri leads a new saga aimed at 2028, with no date, price or pre-orders. Everything we know

The Witcher 4 finally has a year on it, and little else. On Aug. 24, 2026, CD Projekt’s joint CEO, Michał Nowakowski, said in a video address that the game “is targeting a 2028 release window” and that the studio is “not ready to share an exact date.” Ciri, Geralt’s adopted daughter, leads a new saga, and 519 developers were on the game at the end of July.

The short version: no date, no price, no pre-order. The official site shows only the reveal trailer and a tech demo. CD Projekt Red calls the game a single-player, open-world RPG in Unreal Engine 5 for PC, PlayStation and Xbox. A Witcher 3 remaster arrived Sept. 29, and the Songs of the Past expansion follows in 2027. The next chance for news is Nov. 24, with CD Projekt’s third-quarter results.

A lynx on a teaser image

It began with one picture. On March 21, 2022, CD Projekt Red confirmed a new Witcher saga on Unreal Engine 5, with Epic Games as a partner. The teaser showed a medallion that the studio’s global communications director said “is, in fact, shaped after a lynx.”

Fans, working from a story posted to a fan wiki, read it as a new School of the Lynx, a witcher school that until then existed only in fan fiction. The theory is still holding. Ciri wears a lynx medallion in the reveal trailer, and an EU trademark filing by CD Projekt covers a lynx medallion symbol, but the studio has not named a school.

That October the project got a codename, Polaris, as the first of three Witcher games CD Projekt intends to publish “in a six-year period.” In November 2024 it moved into full-scale production.

Ciri takes the contract

Polaris became The Witcher IV on Dec. 12, 2024, at The Game Awards, with a nearly six-minute cinematic trailer and Ciri as the protagonist. Game director Sebastian Kalemba said the studio wants to explore what it means to truly become a witcher.

In the trailer, Ciri takes a contract in a remote village that a monster has terrorized for generations, demanding human sacrifices, and fights with new tools, including a chain. It was pre-rendered in a custom Unreal Engine 5 build on an unannounced Nvidia GeForce RTX card. Ciri sounds different, too: a CD Projekt Red spokesperson confirmed Ciara Berkeley as the new English voice for the trailer and the full game.

Where is Geralt?

Months before the reveal, Geralt’s longtime English voice actor said in a video interview that Geralt is in the next game but the story is not about Geralt this time. The actor later said the comment earned a scolding from the studio. The reveal confirmed it. A day later the game director and executive producer said: “Geralt will appear in the game.” They would not say in what role.

Geralt gets one more adventure first, in Songs of the Past, the third full expansion for The Witcher 3, due in 2027. Nowakowski called it, in a way, “a prologue” to The Witcher 4.

Kovir at 60 fps on a PS5

The first real-time look came on June 3, 2025, at Unreal Fest Orlando: a tech demo running at 60 fps on a PS5, with Ciri and the horse Kelpie crossing Kovir to the port town of Valdrest. The studio labels it “not actual gameplay.” Kovir is new to the games, which confirmed a fan theory built on the studio’s trailer notes: the trailer’s village and its monster, a Bauk, are from the far North.

On June 16 the studio’s VP of technology said the team wants “more of a console-first development” and aims for 60 fps on PS5, but called 60 fps on Xbox Series S “extremely challenging.”

How 2027 turned into 2028

For two years the date was a guessing game. In November 2024 a store listing in a PC game launcher, shared by a forum user, showed Dec. 31, 2025. That is a common placeholder, the entry vanished, and the date is debunked.

On March 25, 2025, CFO Piotr Nielubowicz said the game “will not be launched” before the first target of CD Projekt’s incentive program ends on Dec. 31, 2026. The next day a bank’s analysts, reading the company’s annual report, said its actuarial assumptions suggest 2027 is the internal base case, and a Polish brokerage had assumed a second-quarter 2027 launch. In November 2025 Nowakowski said “we’re not launching in 2026.” On July 31, 2026, a Polish brokerage analyst forecast a fourth-quarter 2027 launch.

Less than four weeks later the 2028 window arrived. The bank’s reading has changed, and the fourth-quarter forecast is debunked. On Sept. 2 CD Projekt repeated 2028 and laid out one major Witcher release a year: the Witcher 3 remaster, Songs of the Past, then The Witcher 4, which Nowakowski called the studio’s “biggest, boldest and most ambitious project in our history so far.”

Consoles, a box and no price

CD Projekt Red names PC, PlayStation and Xbox. Of the current build, Nowakowski said in August: “You can launch it on PC. You can launch it on PS5. You can launch it on Xbox Series X, and it’s going to run.” It is not yet “a full-scale game with all content,” though. On the next generation, Nowakowski said on Sept. 1: “When we launch, if PS5, Xbox Series X/S is what people are playing, we’re going to be there.” No PS6, next-Xbox or Switch 2 version is announced, and no credible leak points to one.

There will be a physical box “with some feelies in it,” and whether a PlayStation box holds a disc depends on Sony’s disc plans for 2028. There is still no price, edition list or pre-order. The Witcher 3 launched at $59.99 in 2015. CFO Nielubowicz said in 2024 that “we do not see a place for microtransactions in the case of single-player games,” and Nowakowski has called an expansion for the new trilogy “difficult.” The multiplayer Witcher project is a separate game, codenamed Sirius.

The voices fans are chasing

Meanwhile, the rumors have turned to the cast. On Sept. 5, 2026, Dandelion’s longtime Polish voice actor told a fan event that the actor had recorded lines for The Witcher 4, but “not much.” CD Projekt Red has not commented, and the claim is still holding.

In October a forum post from a fan who met Yennefer’s English voice actor at a book signing said the actor had recently recorded lines “directly related to Ciri.” It is unconfirmed and still holding, and the actor reportedly did not name the project. An older trace still stands: an actor’s profile on a casting database, first seen in November 2024, lists a role named Branko. The studio has not named the character.

A big team on a long clock

On July 31, 2026, 519 of CD Projekt Red’s 1,045 developers were on The Witcher 4, up from 513 on April 30. Nowakowski says full production means the team knows what game it is making and is filling it with content. The studio’s games usually take three to six years. The Witcher 3 went from reveal to launch in about two years and three months, and Cyberpunk 2077 in about eight and a half years. A 2028 launch would come about six years after the 2022 announcement.

What to watch next

The next date is Nov. 24, 2026, when CD Projekt reports its third-quarter results. Look there for any change to the 2028 window. We update this story as soon as CD Projekt Red names a date, a price or the final platforms.