CD Projekt Red: The Witcher 4 Already Runs on PC and Consoles

CD Projekt Red is taking no chances with The Witcher 4’s technical performance. Co-CEO Michal Nowakowski confirmed that the game is already up and running on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X, with the studio adopting a stricter milestone discipline to avoid repeating the catastrophic launch of Cyberpunk 2077.

A Hard Lesson From Cyberpunk 2077

When Cyberpunk 2077 launched in December 2020, it performed reasonably well on PC despite a pile of bugs, but it was a technical disaster on last-generation consoles. Performance on PlayStation 4 was so poor that Sony pulled the game from the PlayStation Store entirely, an unprecedented move for a major AAA title. The game was only reinstated six months later, and even then Sony attached a warning label advising buyers to proceed with caution.

Speaking to Game Developer and reported by PC Gamer, Nowakowski explained the root cause. The team built Cyberpunk 2077 on PC first because the hardware best supported their cinematic ambitions, and they operated on the assumption that scaling it down to consoles would be straightforward. “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,” Nowakowski said. He also noted that a degree of luck during The Witcher 3’s development gave the studio unwarranted confidence heading into Cyberpunk 2077.

A New Approach to Milestones

For The Witcher 4, CD Projekt Red has overhauled how it handles development checkpoints. In the past, if the team missed one or two milestone targets, the attitude was to push forward and fix the gaps later. Nowakowski described how that approach compounded into serious problems: miss a couple of checkmarks early on and, a few milestones down the road, four or five items are outstanding and much harder to address. Now, the studio stops and resolves any platform-specific issue before moving on.

The result, according to Nowakowski, is that platform parity exists right now during development. “You come to the studio, you launch Witcher 4 right now. You can launch it on PC. You can launch it on PS5. You can launch it on Xbox Series X, and it’s going to run,” he said, as reported by PC Gamer.

Release Still a Long Way Off

The Witcher 4 does not yet have a confirmed release date. The studio is currently targeting a 2028 launch window, meaning there is still considerable development time ahead. That timeline also means plenty of opportunity for things to shift, but the early platform parity the team is describing suggests CD Projekt Red is at least building on a more stable foundation than it did with Cyberpunk 2077.

Sources: PC Gamer