CD Projekt May Pause The Witcher 4 Development Due to Console Issues

No one at the company wants a repeat of the Cyberpunk 2077 situation.

CD Projekt Red does not intend to repeat the launch situation of Cyberpunk 2077 and is already paying special attention to the performance of The Witcher 4 on consoles. According to co-CEO Michał Nowakowski, the game is already running on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.

Nowakowski noted that during the development of Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red focused primarily on PC, expecting to bring the console versions up to the required state afterward. That approach ultimately led to severe performance issues after release.

Now the studio follows a different principle. According to Nowakowski, developers used to be able to miss one or two checkpoints while expecting to close them out later. Sometimes they succeeded, but over time the number of unresolved issues could grow to four or five, and fixing them became much more difficult. In the case of The Witcher 4, CD Projekt Red intends to prevent such problems from accumulating, which is why meeting key requirements on all target platforms has become a mandatory condition for further development progress.