Back in January, the company behind The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt said that we’d be hearing about a release date for the game “soon,” with it expected to be taking place later this year.
Unfortunately, due to the developers wanting to “achieve the quality that will satisfy us” and “the quality gamers expect from us,” The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is now set for a February 2015 release date on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
You can read the full reasoning behind CD Projekt’s decision to push back The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in this open letter they published today on their website:
Ever since we started working on the third installment in The Witcher franchise, it has been our aim to produce a title that would take our 11 years of experience in creating RPGS and distill them into a quintessence, into a game that would effectively crown those years. At the same time, we have wanted The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt to expand creative boundaries, set new benchmarks, develop the genre as a whole.
Ultimately, you, the players, must get an unforgettable adventure to experience in a vast, open world – and that’s most important. We’ve created a story that flows naturally, cinematically, rendered it in amazing sound and visuals, while preserving full freedom of choice – all for you. We knew this to be an ambitious plan, but believed we could achieve it by bringing together our team with its creative energies and current gaming platforms with their technical capabilities. A project this vast and complex would inevitably require special care in its final stages, manual fine-tuning of many details, thorough testing time and again.
We recently re-examined what we had achieved thus far, and faced a choice about the game’s final release date. The decision we made was difficult, thoroughly considered, and ultimately clear and obvious. We could have released the game towards the end of this year as we had initially planned. Yet we concluded that a few additional months will let us achieve the quality that will satisfy us, the quality gamers expect from us. Consequently, we have set the release of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for February 2015.
Dear gamers: we know many of you would have liked to play The Witcher 3 sooner, as soon as possible, even. We’re sorry to make you wait longer than you, or we, initially assumed you would. At the same time, we believe the game will prove to be worth the wait and meet the expectations you have of us. We believe The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt will be an exceptional RPG, one of the best, providing many hours of wonderful entertainment.
If you were hoping to hear about resolution and framerate for The Witcher 3 ahead of time, Senior Art Producer Michał Krzemiński told GamesTM (via VG247) that it’s pointless to talk about before the game’s finished:
If you’re asking me to throw a rock in the PS4 vs. Xbox One resolution war, I won’t. The game is not finished and talking about resolutions, framerates, and [minimum PC specs] is, I think, pointless. Everything can change during the optimization process at the end of development. Rest assured, we’re working our butts off [to] make The Witcher 3 run and feel equally awesome on every platform.
Are you glad to know the developers are taking their time to make this as good as possible, or are you disappointed by the delay? Let us know in the comments below.
