We may earn a commission when you buy through links in our articles. Learn more.

Monsters run free: The Witcher 3 delayed until February 2015

The Witcher 3 delayed until February 2015

Tragedy has struck. The monsters are winning. Dragons are burning down the countryside, ghouls are having loud parties in graveyards and demonic beasties are hassling folk in the street. What we need is a Witcher, but we won’t be getting one until February, 2015.

Can we even survive for that long?

Today, Polish developer and creators of The Witcher games CD Projekt Red announced a delay in the highly anticipated The Witcher 3, which will see pasty-faced monster hunter Geralt gloomily travelling through an open world for the first time.

“Ultimately, you, the players, must get an unforgettable adventure to experience in a vast, open world – and that’s most important,” CD Projekt Red said. “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.”

And it is this fine-tuning and refining that seems to have led to the developer’s decision to push the release of Geralt’s next violent adventure back. “We recently reexamined what we had achieved thus far, and faced a choice about the game’s final release date,” CD Projekt Red said. “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.”

A melodramatic bent makes me want to say that I am beside myself, but really this can only be good news. It’s easy to get miffed about delays, but surely more time spent refining the game – especially one as ambitious as The Witcher 3 – will pay dividends in the end. Both of the previous games could have done with a few extra months of tweaking and polishing. The original game launched in an absolutely dire state, to the point where it was nearly unplayable for many, while The Witcher 2 was a bit rough around the edges and was the victim of numerous bugs.