The Witcher 4 is still in development at CD Projekt Red. That's the official word, no date attached, no window, nothing. And fantasy RPG fans know how these things go anyway. The wait is the wait.

The good news is the fantasy genre is quietly loaded right now. Winter is Coming put together a list of five new and upcoming fantasy games worth your time while Geralt's world simmers, and it's a solid starting point if you've got a monster-slaying shaped hole in your library.

The Witcher franchise went quiet on the game side for a long stretch, nearly a decade by Winter is Coming's own framing. The Netflix show kept the name alive in the meantime, as Winter is Coming has noted elsewhere in its coverage. Now the fantasy well is filling back up, and that's good for those of us who like our fantasy with teeth instead of pastel cozy vibes. (No shade to cozy games, I wrote a whole piece about how they keep getting announced and never released. Different genre, different problems.)

So what should you actually play? The Winter is Coming list leans on recent and upcoming releases that scratch the same itch: grim worlds, moral murk, swords that matter. It's worth a click for the full five, because they clearly did the homework on what fills the specific Witcher-shaped gap, dark medieval settings and choices that bend the story.

And whenever The Witcher 4 actually lands, the calendar around it is only getting more crowded. Big blockbusters dominate every conversation when they arrive, which is exactly why I keep saying mid-size games are at risk of getting buried; the fantasy titles on lists like this one deserve better than to get trampled in the chaos.

My advice? Play them now, before the next crush begins. Your future self, sitting in a post-Witcher 4 world, will thank you for the backlog.

What's holding your fantasy fix while we wait? Drop it in the comments, my Discord has been arguing about this exact question for a week and I need backup.