It’s been years since we got an update on Project Polaris — more commonly referred to as The Witcher 4 — but developer CD Projekt Red announced Tuesday that it has now entered “full-scale production.”
Ahead of its quarterly investor call, joint CEO Michał Nowakowski said that the highly-anticipated game is in the “most intensive phase of development.”
“We are very pleased with our progress on this project, and I wish to thank the team for its dedication,” Nowakowski said.
Game director Sebastian Kalemba confirmed the news on X with an image of some Witcher coins (that were probably tossed to your Witcher). “With new challenges just around the corner, it’s the talented and hard-working people who make me believe we can together make the upcoming Witcher Saga a remarkable experience.
CD Projekt Red announced that Project Polaris was in pre-production in 2022 with a short teaser image that pictured a wolf pendant commonly worn by Geralt of Rivia laying in the snow and the tagline “A new saga begins.” We’ve gotten sparse updates on development since then, but we know that it’s the first in a new trilogy of AAA RPGs that’ll all be developed in Unreal Engine 5. Nowakowski said during a financial presentation that it won’t be “The Witcher 3 in new clothing,” with new gameplay.
Indeed, Polaris is CD Projekt Red’s biggest project right now. As of November, 400 out of 650 developers are assigned to Polaris, with the second biggest project being Orion.
— CD PROJEKT IR (@CDPROJEKTRED_IR) November 26, 2024
However, due to the switch to Unreal Engine 5, development will take a while, with one estimate saying it was at least three years away.
It’s worth noting that it’s still unclear if this is The Witcher 4. Polaris and The Witcher 4 have been used interchangeably, but global PR director Radek Grabowski wrote on X that at the time of Polaris‘ announcement, the team did not announce a game called The Witcher 4.
There are other Witcher games in development, including Canis Majoris that’ll be separate from the new series, and Sirius, which is being developed by Molasses Flood and is set in the Witcher universe. This all makes sense as The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is one of the highest-selling games of all time.
In other news from Tuesday’s financial presentation, CD Projekt Red announced that Cyberpunk 2077 had sold 30 million copies. Its Phantom Liberty DLC sold over 8 million since launch last year.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.