The Witcher 4 director pledges no crunch for dev team

News of the next Witcher game has fans excited, but some strongly remember the awful crunch that the Cyberpunk 2077 team went through under CD Projekt Red’s watch. Avoiding that situation is a goal of The Witcher 4 director this time around.

Jason Slama, who previously directed The Witcher’s Gwent spinoff, announced on Twitter that he’s also helming this new game. A retweet brought up the aforementioned crunch controversy, to which Slama replied, “Never on my watch!” The Witcher 4 is a long way off, so there’s a lot of time for Slama to be proven right (or wrong) about avoiding crunch.

We don’t even know who the hero of the new game is at this stage. Witcher fans think Ciri will be the playable character, due to the snow-covered School of the Cat medallion featured in the game’s promo image. Series staple Geralt studied at the School of the Wolf, and while Ciri technically did the same, she’s adorned with the School of the Cat symbol.

At the very least, we know that The Witcher 4 is moving from CD Projekt Red’s own engine onto Unreal Engine 5. Notably, that engine is owned by Epic Games, proprietors of the Epic Games Store. Fortunately, we also know that the new Witcher game will not be an Epic Games Store exclusive. CDPR explicitly said that it’s “not planning on making the game exclusive to one storefront.”