The Witcher Remake Slows Down as It Waits on The Witcher 4 Technology

Development of The Witcher Remake has taken a back seat as CD PROJEKT RED and Fool’s Theory wait for technology being created alongside The Witcher 4 to mature. Joint CEO Michał Nowakowski has confirmed that the remake requires additional time because of technical dependencies connecting the 2 projects, explaining why progress on Geralt’s original adventure has remained limited while The Witcher 4 moves deeper into production. Speaking with The Game Business, Nowakowski said Fool’s Theory was originally brought in to develop the remake before the teams realized its production pipeline depended more heavily on The Witcher 4 than initially expected.

"They were supposed to work on The Witcher 1 remake, but we realized that needed a bit more time."
— Quote by: Michał Nowakowski, Joint CEO of CD PROJEKT RED.

The situation is not completely new. CD PROJEKT RED already disclosed during its fiscal 2024 results that development of The Witcher Remake had been temporarily integrated with work on The Witcher 4 because of dependencies involving assets and technology. A portion of Fool’s Theory was moved to support The Witcher 4 so that the necessary tools, assets and production pipelines could eventually be reused to make development of the remake more efficient. CD PROJEKT RED later reiterated that only a smaller group remained focused directly on The Witcher Remake while the majority of Fool’s Theory worked elsewhere.

This shared technology strategy makes sense because both projects are being developed around Unreal Engine 5, representing a major technical transition away from the proprietary REDengine used for previous Witcher games. The Witcher 4 is effectively becoming the foundation for CD PROJEKT RED’s future open world development pipeline, with the studio working alongside Epic Games to customize Unreal Engine technology for large environments, streaming, animation and other systems required by its RPGs.

That technical relationship also explains why simply pushing the remake forward independently could create additional work later. If Fool’s Theory built systems before The Witcher 4 finalized the tools and pipelines expected to support both projects, portions of the remake could eventually require substantial rebuilding. Waiting allows the studio to inherit technology that has already been tested through CD PROJEKT RED’s much larger production.

Fool’s Theory has not been sitting idle. The developer is currently co developing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Songs of the Past, which returns Geralt to the Path in 2027 with a completely new adventure set in Letten. CD PROJEKT RED officially confirmed Fool’s Theory as its development partner for the expansion, giving the studio another opportunity to work directly with Witcher systems, quests and world design while the technical foundation required for the remake continues developing. Songs of the Past was recently showcased at Gamescom 2026 alongside The Witcher 3 Remastered.

The remake itself remains an ambitious reinterpretation rather than a conventional graphical refresh. CD PROJEKT RED announced the project in 2022 as a complete reconstruction of the 2007 original using modern technology, with Fool’s Theory developing the game under CD PROJEKT RED’s creative supervision. The company later described it as a story driven single player open world RPG, indicating that its structure could differ considerably from the smaller chapter based environments of the original game. That transition has already raised questions about how Fool’s Theory will preserve the pacing and atmosphere that defined Geralt’s first adventure, something previously explored in our coverage of The Witcher Remake’s open world challenge.

The decision also fits CD PROJEKT RED’s wider development restructuring. The company has introduced stricter production rules for The Witcher 4 and future projects, including stronger milestone gates, documentation requirements and clearer definitions of when development work is actually complete. More recently, CD PROJEKT RED confirmed that The Witcher 4 cannot move past certain development milestones when a target console fails its technical requirements, showing how aggressively the studio is attempting to avoid accumulating technical problems across its next generation games.

There is currently no release date for The Witcher Remake, and CD PROJEKT RED has not announced that the project has been cancelled or permanently suspended. The latest comments instead reinforce what the company has been signaling for more than a year: The Witcher 4 comes first technically, and the remake will benefit from the tools and development infrastructure created along the way.

Calling The Witcher Remake cancelled or completely abandoned would misrepresent what CD PROJEKT RED has actually said. The project appears to be deliberately waiting for The Witcher 4 to solve expensive technical problems first.

That could ultimately benefit the remake considerably. Fool’s Theory is rebuilding a 2007 RPG as a modern open world game, and creating an entirely separate technology pipeline while CD PROJEKT RED is simultaneously developing its next generation Witcher framework would create unnecessary duplication.

Songs of the Past also gives Fool’s Theory something productive to build while those dependencies mature. If The Witcher 4 establishes the tools, streaming systems and open world technology that CD PROJEKT RED expects, the remake could eventually restart from a much stronger technical foundation instead of becoming another project burdened by technology that needs to be rewritten halfway through production.

Would you rather wait longer for The Witcher Remake if it means Fool’s Theory can build it using the mature technology and tools created for The Witcher 4?