CD Projekt RED announced a little over a year ago that it had dropped its internal RED Engine and was shifting its entire development pipeline over to Unreal Engine 5, with the next mainline The Witcher game, codenamed Project Polaris, set to be the studio’s first game to be built on Epic Games’ development toolset. In a recent earnings conference, CD Projekt CEO Adam Kiciński touched on that topic again, offering more insight into how that decision will help the studio moving forward.
According to Kiciński, the studio is still very much in the process of getting familiar with the new engine, but though development for the aforementioned Polaris itself hasn’t accelerated following the switch in engine, it will apparently “smoothen production” for its sequels. In fact, Kiciński says shifting to Unreal Engine 5 is a big reason for why CD Projekt RED previously said it plans on launching the entire new trilogy of The Witcher games within six years of each other.
“We are preparing things on the pipeline side and toolset sides. Some developers are still learning the [Unreal Engine 5] technology, and at the same time, there are teams working together with Epic on all aspects that are needed for our open-world, story-driven RPGs,” he said (via Wccftech). “Definitely, for [our] first project, Polaris, it will… maybe not slow down, but it won’t accelerate the [development] processes. But for the next projects, we assume that it should smoothen production. That was one of the reasons behind saying we want to release three big Witcher games within six years, starting with the release of Polaris, which is The Witcher 4.”
Back in May last year, CDPR confirmed that The Witcher 4 was already in pre-production and had over a hundred people working on it, and that the switch to Unreal Engine 5 had already brought about improved development efficiency.
In fact, The Witcher Remake, which will be fully open world game, is also being developed on Unreal Engine 5 by Fool’s Theory in collaboration with CD Projekt RED, and is expected to launch after Project Polaris.