Joint-CEO Michał Nowakowski posted a short update on 24 August: The Witcher 4 is “targeting” a 2028 release. He said it could slip. Coverage across the usual outlets ran the headline as a release-window story, which is fair — it is the first number CD Projekt Red has attached to this game’s launch at all. The new saga was announced in March 2022 alongside the move to Unreal Engine 5, Ciri was revealed as its protagonist at The Game Awards in December 2024, and a tech demo ran at State of Unreal in June 2025. Four years, three public appearances, no window until this week.
The more informative detail sat one line further down: over 500 developers are working on it, and this is the first CD Projekt Red game built on Unreal Engine 5 rather than the studio’s own REDengine.
Why “targeting” is doing real work in that sentence
REDengine was written in-house, for CD Projekt Red’s own open-world RPGs, tuned over three console generations to the specific things this studio’s games do: dense narrative branching, hand-placed world detail at Witcher-3 density, a rendering pipeline nobody outside Warsaw had to learn from scratch. Every artist and engineer on the last three Witcher games and Cyberpunk 2077 already knew where the levers were.
Unreal Engine 5 is a different toolset with different defaults, and “targeting” is the word a studio uses when it is still finding out how its own production numbers translate into someone else’s engine. World Partition streaming behaves differently from a bespoke open-world system. Nanite handles the foliage density Witcher games are known for, but not for free — the June 2025 tech demo at Unreal Fest specifically called out Nanite Foliage and the new Unreal Animation Framework as things the partnership with Epic had to build up rather than switch on. MetaHuman covers faces; it doesn’t cover the mass AI crowd systems the same demo showed running in the Kovir tech demo, which is custom work bolted onto the engine, not a feature it ships with.
What 500 developers on one open-world game actually means
That headcount is the number worth sitting with, more than the year. It’s larger than the credited team on The Witcher 3, and it’s still growing during what CD Projekt Red is calling pre-production-adjacent tooling work rather than full production. Two things drive a number that size on an engine the studio didn’t write:
Retraining, not just hiring. A veteran environment artist who spent a decade inside REDengine’s material and streaming systems doesn’t become productive in Unreal Engine 5 by opening the editor. World Partition’s data-layer and HLOD workflow, Nanite’s mesh-budget rules, Lumen’s indirect-lighting behaviour under an open sky — these are different enough from a bespoke pipeline that the studio is effectively re-teaching its own senior staff a discipline they already had, on top of bringing in people who already know Unreal.
Custom tooling on someone else’s foundation. The tech demo’s crowd system and the animation framework work Epic and CD Projekt Red did together aren’t small side quests — they’re the studio rebuilding the specific capabilities REDengine already had, inside a new engine, before full production can lean on them. That work doesn’t show up in a trailer. It shows up as months added to a schedule with nothing new to demo, which is exactly the gap between the June 2025 tech demo and this week’s “targeting 2028” update.
The decision to move to Unreal is sound Engine 5 — sharing tooling with the rest of the industry, tapping an engine that gets fixes and hardware support CD Projekt Red doesn’t have to fund alone, is a reasonable trade for a studio that just spent years patching Cyberpunk 2077’s launch problems on its own dime. But a reasonable trade still costs what it costs, and the 2028 target is the studio pricing that cost out loud for the first time.
What to watch instead of the date
The date will move; Nowakowski said as much. What won’t lie is whether the next public showing is still tech-demo footage — a curated slice built to prove the engine can do the job — or the first uncut gameplay built inside whatever tools the 500-person team has actually finished. That’s the tell for whether the transition is behind them or still the thing eating the schedule.
Gamescom 2026 isn’t it. What CD Projekt Red has at Cologne this week is Witcher 3 material: Songs of the Past, an expansion co-developed with Fool’s Theory that goes to a new region called Letten and lands in 2027, plus a Remastered version of the base game going out free to existing owners on 29 September.
Read that as a schedule rather than a snub. The expansion is being built with an outside partner and the remaster is work on an eleven-year-old build in the old engine, so neither one competes for the Unreal team’s attention. It keeps a Witcher on stage every year between now and 2028 without asking the Witcher 4 build to stand in front of a live audience before it can.
Release-window and headcount details from CD Projekt Red’s 24 August statement, as reported by Push Square, Shacknews, GameRant and PlayStation LifeStyle. Engine and tech-demo details from CD Projekt Red and Epic Games’ joint presentation at Unreal Fest and State of Unreal 2025. Songs of the Past and Remastered dates from CD Projekt Red’s own press centre. Accurate as of 25 August 2026 — the 2028 target is explicitly a target.