This probably isn’t the first time you’ve heard this, but The Witcher 4 has entered “full-scale production”.

Great news. But what does “full-scale” mean, really? Developing a video game takes a lot of time, so does that mean we’ll see it sometime this decade or does it mean we’ll see it closer to 2030?

Well according to CD Projekt’s CEO, the team expects to have The Witcher 4 out before the end of 2027 – at the latest.

In an interview with Eurogamer’s Chris Tapsell, Michal Nowakowski explained what went wrong with Cyberpunk 2077’s launch and how they’ve learned from the mistakes they made back in 2019.

“To be honest, when we were kicking off the marketing campaign officially with pre-orders, which was the Keanu on stage [moment, at E3 in June 2019], the plan was actually to launch roughly one year later,” Nowakowski told Eurogamer.

Cyberpunk 2077 has come a long way.

“It just didn’t really work. So we didn’t really plan for like a two-year campaign, and I still think that one year would really be fine [in terms of] time for a promotional campaign of that game.”

Now here’s the juicy part you’re all here for, as Nowakowski then went on to explain how the Cyberpunk 2077 debacle will impact The Witcher 4’s release.

“[CD Projekt] learned a lot of good practices from that experience: so announce the date when you’re like really, really sure of it,” he continued.

“And now I think we have much better tools to be sure of that date, which we – on a smaller scale – proved to ourselves with Phantom Liberty… for a new game, we would still expect a slightly longer – but not two-year – lasting campaign.”

So slightly longer than a year, slightly shorter than two years. Blimey. I’d have been the first to have told you that I assumed this game would be coming out a lot later than that.

Still, we’ll have to see how the aforementioned “full-scale production” goes. The team could run into any number of delays, so let’s see how it all pans out.