The Witcher 3 Next-Gen announcement has arrived long time agoIn fact, its launch was scheduled for the second quarter of 2022, a date that will not be met in the end, as the CD Projekt RED has confirmed an “indefinite” delay, ie without a new possible launch date. This is bad news for the franchise fans, among whom I am, even the worst is the uncertainty we have remained in.

Our colleague David provided us with this information yesterday and no, we do not know why the delay occurred and it is not clear whether the delay is short-term, medium-term or long-term, even though we see the official announcement of the Polish study I feel like things will take a long time. I will leave you an official comment of the RED Project CD on The Witcher 3 Next-Gen so that you can draw your own conclusions:

“We have decided to entrust the remaining work on the next generation of version of Sorcerer 3: Wild Hunt to our own development team. At the moment we evaluate the scope of work to be performed and therefore we must postpone the release of Q2 until further notice. “

In short, even the RED Project CD is unclear about how much time it will have to invest in completing development on The Witcher 3 Next-Gen, and this is already a clear sign that things will not be resolved in a few months. I’m hesitant to give a date, but right now I don’t think we’ll see The Witcher 3 Next-Gen until sometime in 2023.

What could cause the indefinite delay of The Witcher 3 Next-Gen?

As we expected, we do not have an official comment from the CD Projekt RED, but much can be deduced from reading between the lines. The first is that the project has changed owners and is now being implemented internally, which means The Polish studio decided to intervene to ensure that the development cycle was completed. This can mean many things:

• Easy hand exchange accelerate development that it was too slow, which doesn’t seem likely to me.
• Action required because CD Project RED I was not satisfied with the result which showed The Witcher 3 Next-Gen.
• Mixture both pointsor the urgent need to hone and optimize the game in its current state in order to bring to market a better completed title and more in line with the expectations it has generated.

In terms of the improvements that The Witcher 3 Next-Gen will bring, the application of ray tracing can be expected, as well as the shortening of loading due to greater use of current SSD units. It was not specified how The Witcher 3 Next-Gen would use ray tracing, but as I said at the time Ideally, it should focus on lighting. That would be the most attractive option and also the most challenging.

Despite the time that The Witcher 3 has, it remains a game with excellent technical processing and is very demanding. Just to give you an idea, the GeForce RTX 2080 Super can move in 4K and maximum quality with average speed 70 FPS. Needless to say, when using ray tracing performance will be significantly reduced. Maybe this is a good time integrate major scaling technologies moment and compensate for this loss of performance. Yes, I mean DLSS from NVIDIA and FSR from AMD.

This leads me to think exactly about another interesting option, and that is the one Witcher 3 Next-Gen can look great for the new generation. I’m not without reason, I remind you that both the PS5 and the Xbox Series X have already shown that ray tracing is great for them and that titles like Dying Light 2 and Cyberpunk have brought them to their knees. The wizard 3 Next-Gen with ray tracing may not work well on both consoles, so the CD Projekt RED had to step in and postpone the release.

If anyone questions this argument, I remind you Sorcerer 3 has already suffered a major “downgrade” to adapt it to the capabilities of the PS4 and Xbox One, and that it didn’t please the PC gamers at all, who ended up with a title that didn’t match the videos that Project RED CD had previously shown.

I remind you that The Witcher 3 Next-Gen will arrive as completely free updates for users who already have the original, although it will also be available as a standalone game, which means that those who do not have it will be able to buy it, in a package that will include all its extensions.