While CD Projekt RED used its proprietary in-house game engine – the RED Engine – to develop The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Cyberpunk 2077, the studio has spoken quite a bit about switching to Unreal Engine 5 for the development of The Witcher 4. In a conversation on the Deconstructor of Fun podcast, the studio’s co-CEO Michał Nowakowski said that this decision came down to the team wanting to focus on making games rather than solving technical issues.
CD Projekt RED first started paying attention to Unreal Engine 5 around the time when Epic Games released The Matrix Awakens as a way to showcase all of the technical strides it had made. Nowakowski recalls having internal discussions about whether this meant that Unreal Engine 5 was ready to ship the studio’s games, and the decision at the time was no. However, after fostering a relationship with Epic and working on the engine itself, the studio was confident that it could adopt the engine for its own games.
“It was more the moment we got an early scoop of the Matrix demo that Epic made, and we then asked ourselves: is UE5 ready to ship a game like we make… the answer is no, not at the moment, not at the entry level, but if we form a relationship with Unreal and if we work on certain things which are specifically required to make games of the size and scope… it could actually work.”
“Our goal was not really to create technology but to tell stories. But then we realized that in order to tell the stories the way we want to tell them, we do need to have the technology. [By using Unreal Engine 5] we’re not going to be responsible for creating the technology from scratch but rather creating for that technology little things that actually make a big difference.”
It is worth noting that the decision to license an engine like Unreal Engine 5 or build an in-house one largely comes down to each company. While many across the industry prefer to simply license Unreal or Unity, others prefer to have a larger amount of control over the technology powering their games. One notable example of this would be Capcom with its RE Engine, which first made its debut with Resident Evil 7 in 2017, and continues to power recent games like Pragmata, Monster Hunter Wilds, and Onimusha: Way of the Sword.
As for Unreal Engine 5, engineering production manager on The Witcher 4, Jan Hermanowicz, had spoken about how the technical advancements made by Epic would also help CD Projekt with its future games, allowing for faster turnaround on projects. He noted that “the more tailored, the more appropriate for our type of game the pipelines are and the technology is, the easier it is to make the game.”
“We have multiple projects in flight now. [Cyberpunk 2077 sequel] Orion moved to pre-production.”
The Witcher 4 doesn’t yet have a release date and is being developed for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
