The Witcher 4 Is a 2028 Game, and the Word "Targeting" Is Doing Heavy Lifting

Two more years. That's the number CD Projekt Red just attached to The Witcher 4, and if you were one of the people who watched that first teaser and quietly started putting money aside for a new graphics card, you can go ahead and leave it in the drawer a while longer.

Joint-CEO Michal Nowakowski says the team is "targeting" 2028, calls it "our biggest, boldest, and most ambitious game to date", and asks players to let the team cook. More than 500 developers are on it. There is still no exact date - only a year.

And that word "targeting" is doing an enormous amount of work. The studio hasn't announced a release date, it has announced an intention. The Witcher 3 slipped. Cyberpunk 2077 slipped repeatedly and then shipped anyway in a state the studio spent years apologising for. A year that's still more than two years out is a plan, not a promise, and anyone who has followed this developer long enough knows to pencil it in rather than ink it.

Why this one lands differently here

The Witcher has never been just another franchise in this part of Europe. It came out of a Warsaw studio, built on books by a Polish author, stuffed with folklore that feels closer to something your grandmother might have told you than to imported high fantasy. When The Witcher 3 arrived in 2015 it was one of the very few blockbusters that felt like it was written in a landscape we recognise. That's why "2028" reads as a personal letdown for a lot of players here in a way another shooter delay never would.

The practical upside is real, though. Don't build a PC for this game. Whatever you buy this autumn will be mid-range at best by 2028, and right now is a genuinely bad moment to be buying memory and storage anyway - AI demand has pushed RAM and SSD prices up hard, and that's before you get to how console prices land locally compared to the western lists. If The Witcher 4 is your reason to upgrade, your window is 2027, not now.

There's a second thing worth saying out loud. A 2028 target means nobody has to pretend a preorder makes sense. No deluxe edition, no season pass on a game that doesn't even have a date. The most consumer-friendly part of this announcement is simply how long it lets you keep your wallet shut.

Do I think it actually lands in 2028? If there's any wobble at all, I'd bet on early 2029 - big studios announce years, then quarters, then delays. But I'll take that over the alternative, and we all know exactly what the alternative looks like, because plenty of us bought it in December 2020 and then spent a year waiting for patches to make it work.

Image: włodi from London, UK / CC BY-SA 2.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Witcher_-_a_fragment_of_the_game_world%27s_map_(2280009704).jpg