Geralt will re-emerge from this forest in 2015.
We won’t be going on any open world jaunts with Geralt of Rivia this year. CD Projekt Red has opted to delay The Witcher 3 until February 2015, a few months later than the previously intended release date.
In an open letter, the development team writes:
“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 storyy 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 reexamined 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.”
The letter signs off with a direct message to prospective players, which reads “we believe the game will prove to be worth the wait and meet the expectations you have of us.” It also has some words for the company’s shareholders, stating “We firmly believe that quality – more than any other factor – determines a game’s success, and that the decision we have made is thus equally valid in business terms.”
The Witcher 3 is a much-anticipated game, so any delay is always going to feel a little bit disappointing. In this situation, all we can really do is trust that the developers have made a wise choice.
