The Witcher 4 Dev Reveals How It Won’t Repeat Cyberpunk 2077’s Mistakes

While Cyberpunk 2077 has gone on to be one of the most beloved RPGs of the past decade, this wasn’t the case at launch. Upon its arrival in 2020, Cyberpunk 2077 was littered with bugs, performance struggles, and a host of additional issues that made many feel like the game was released too early. This controversy resulted in developer CD Projekt Red taking a rather major hit to its reputation, which has somewhat continued to loom over the studio. Now, with CDPR gearing up to release The Witcher 4 in the coming years, the team behind the much-anticipated sequel has opened up about how it’s not repeating the same mistakes as before.

Speaking to Game Developer, CD Projekt Red’s co-CEO Michal Nowakowski said that the company has ensured that The Witcher 4 can internally run on both consoles and PCs right now. Throughout its development on Cyberpunk 2077, Nowakowski explained that the studio focused too heavily on the PC version, as it thought it could easily adapt this edition to consoles later on. As it turned out, this ended up presenting a lot of problems with Cyberpunk 2077 across Xbox and PlayStation hardware, which is why these versions of the game ended up being in a worse state upon their release. For The Witcher 4, CD Projekt Red has abandoned this development process, as it’s now developing all versions of the game at once and making sure that they can run well in advance of launch.

“The way the studio was thinking was that we are reaching for the best possible visuals,” Nowakowski said of Cyberpunk 2077’s development. “We want to push the boundaries of what is doable in terms of cinematic feeling and whatnot, and PC was just the best suited rig for that. There was this, as it turned out, false belief that toning it down to whatever was the current gen is not going to be that much of a challenge. […] Since then, we don’t take chances. We want to be sure that it actually works.”

Beyond putting a greater focus on the console versions of The Witcher 4, Nowakowski said that it has also made sure that any issues that pop up with the game are addressed almost immediately. In the past, Nowakowski mentioned that CDPR would occasionally push certain problems down the road, which would lead to them building up and presenting greater issues. Now, this is something that those within the studio have stopped doing, which should make The Witcher 4 much less buggy by the time it does arrive.

Speaking of which, CD Projekt Red recently confirmed that The Witcher 4 is targeting a release in 2028. In the interim, though, the studio will be releasing a new remaster of The Witcher 3 at the end of this month, which will precede the game’s new Songs of the Past expansion, which launches in 2027.

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