The Witcher 1 Remake Is on Hold Until The Witcher 4 Is Ready
The Witcher 1 remake has no active development happening right now, and CD Projekt Red has confirmed why. The 200-person studio handling the project, Fool's Theory, is nearly entirely occupied with other work. If you were waiting for the rebuilt version of the 2007 original, expect a long wait.
The squeeze
Fool's Theory's team is split across two other projects. The majority is working on Songs of the Past, the upcoming Witcher 3 DLC due in 2027. A smaller portion has been pulled in to help CD Projekt Red with The Witcher 4, which is targeting a 2028 release. That leaves effectively nobody on the remake.
The reason W4 needs outside help comes down to engine migration. CD Projekt Red is dropping its proprietary REDengine and rebuilding the entire franchise on Unreal Engine 5. The transition has proven more complicated than expected — requiring custom plugins, new toolchain extensions, and source-level modifications. GameSpot reported joint-CEO Michał Nowakowski's direct explanation: the remake is tied to W4's UE5 foundation, and development cannot move forward until the assets, tools, and pipelines built for W4 are ready to hand off.
As FinalBoss notes, the Epic partnership only partially offsets the migration cost — the bulk of the engineering work still falls on CDPR's own teams.
The timeline
The remake was announced in October 2022 with a promise to rebuild the game from scratch on Unreal Engine 5. Nearly three years later, there is still no release date and development is effectively paused. Work is expected to resume in 2027, after Songs of the Past ships — but the finished game will arrive after The Witcher 4.
In the near term, the only concrete release is The Witcher 3 Remaster, due September 29, 2026. That makes it the sole new Witcher release before the DLC in 2027, with W4 and the remake stacked somewhere beyond that.
The pattern
This will feel familiar to anyone who followed Cyberpunk 2077. CDPR has a track record of ambitious announcements followed by delivery timelines that stretch well past expectations. The company is now managing three major Witcher releases simultaneously — a remaster, a sequel, and a remake — while migrating its entire tech stack. Something was always going to slip. Right now, it's the remake.
