Bad news for those waiting to control Geralt Of Rivia on your Playstation 5, Xbox Series S and X in The Witcher III, but CD Projekt Red decided to make a move for the best but a monetarily the sacrifice nonetheless.
And the sacrifice is to declare a delay on the launch of next-gen version of The Witcher III and not having a new date.
But what happened?
As per The WWitcher official Twitter account, the development of the game needed to be taken over by CD Projekt Red itself and while not giving much details, I can conclude that the associated studio working on the remastering of the game didn’t met expectations and CD Projekt Red proactively discarded them.
We have decided to have our in-house development team conduct the remaining work on the next-gen version of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. We are currently evaluating the scope of work to be done and thus have to postpone Q2 release until further notice. 1/2
— The Witcher (@witchergame) April 13, 2022
We'll update you as soon as we can. Thank you for your understanding. 2/2
— The Witcher (@witchergame) April 13, 2022
Not having a programmed new release window means that development stepped backwards and this is an uncomfortable trend that CD Projekt Red have been facing ever since the launch of Cyberpunk 2077.
UPDATE (04/14/2022)
CD Projekt Red may have been force to cut ties with the associated development studios probably in relationship to the War on Ukraine.
Kotaku mentioned that the studio that no longer will work with the game's remaster is Saber Interactive and while they are USA-based, the particular group working with the game are ironically located in St. Petersburg, Russia.
While CD Projekt Red didn't ellaborate on the report and acknowledging/denying the reports, Saber Interactive was the studio that worked the Nintendo Switch version of The Witcher 3.