The Witcher Website Crashes Immediately After New Game Announcement
Soon after CD Projekt Red announced a new game in The Witcher series, the franchise's official website crashed for countless users. Next to nothing is known about the next Witcher title from CDPR, though the developer did confirm in a write-up that it will abandon its propiertary REDengine in favor of working on Unreal Engine 5.
Adapted from Andrzej Sapkowski's best-selling series of novels, the first Witcher-branded video game hit store shelves for PC in 2007. A sequel followed a few years later in 2011, earning high praise from critics and players alike. However, CD Projekt Red's games and The Witcher IP in general truly reached the stratosphere with the release of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in May 2015. A couple of beloved DLC expansions and Gwent-focused spinoff titles have launched in the many years since then, but franchise faithful continue to await a fourth mainline entry. Now, after years of Witcher game teases, the crew at CDPR has finally confirmed that production on a new installment is well underway.
In a move that shocked much of the internet, CD Projekt Red today announced that it's begun work on the next iteration of its Witcher game series. The Witcher Twitter account shared the news with fans in a brief post, which featured a link to the game franchise's official website. Unsurprisingly, the site quickly crashed under the weight of excess traffic; as a result, the social media page followed up its original tweet with a screengrab of the blog write-up. Read the press release below since, at the time of writing, the webpage remains inaccessible:
As noted in the screenshot above, CD Projekt Red is not yet ready to talk shop about what the newest interactive Witcher adventure will entail. Many fans hold out hope, however, that Ciri will star in the new Witcher saga. Considering the events of Wild Hunt, specifically her playable sections and the "good" ending, reason suggests Ciri standing front and center constitutes the natural progression of things.
That the website so quickly fell beneath the weight of extensive internet traffic should hardly come as a surprise. After all, the brand has only grown in popularity since The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt's release several years ago. And some of that is also thanks to the Henry Cavill-starring Netflix series, which debuted its second season late in 2021. Undoubtedly, CDPR's websites will receive another influx of users whenever concrete details about the long-awaited new-gen upgrades for The Witcher 3 go live.
Source: The Witcher (1, 2), CD Projekt Red