CD Projekt Red Announce Remake of The First Witcher Game

Posted on by Nox

In a blog post earlier today, CD Projekt Red announced that work has begun on a remake of The Witcher I. The new old game will be rebuilt, from the ground up, in Unreal Engine 5. The game will be developed by Polish studio Fool’s Theory, which is staffed by several veteran Witcher developers, with CDPR providing ‘creative supervision’.

The game was hinted at earlier this year as codename Canis Majoris.

Factoid Round

Considering that these days, talking about the Witcher games is synonymous to talking about The Witcher III, here’s a few factoids about the first installment. There’s a boatload of people who’ve never played the first two games but played the third, if you can believe it!

The first Witcher came out in 2007 on Windows and Mac. It was developed on the Aurora engine, which was used by BioWare on their 2002 game, Neverwinter Nights. The plot takes place after the events of The Lady of the Lake, which is the fifth and final novel in the book series.

While I’m personally not as big of a fan of the first game, it was received quite positively by the broader gaming community, sitting at an 81 out of 100 on Metacritic. Back when GameSpy was a thing, they gave it their “PC RPG of the Year” award!

geralt in the witcher 1
It’s kind of nuts how Geralt went from looking like Hugo Weaving to, well, Henry Cavill I suppose.

The blog post ends by tempering out expectations with the following sentence: “And although it will take some time before we’re ready to share more about and from the game, I know it’ll be worth the wait.” This sounds like a minimum 2024 release to us. With all this time to wait, tell us: What’s your favorite memory of playing the first Witcher? Let us know in the comments below!