CD Projekt Red says Witcher 4 engine switch was not about Cyberpunk launch
CD Projekt Red has clarified that its decision to build the next Witcher on Unreal Engine 5 wasn’t a course correction prompted by Cyberpunk 2077’s rocky debut. Co-CEO Michał Nowakowski said the pivot is about future ambitions and toolsets, not a repudiation of the company’s in-house REDengine.
REDengine wasn’t the culprit
According to Nowakowski, the challenges that surrounded Cyberpunk 2077’s release did not stem from REDengine itself. The proprietary tech has underpinned the studio’s biggest RPGs for more than a decade, including The Witcher 2 (2011), The Witcher 3 (2015), and Cyberpunk 2077 (2020). Internally, the studio credits REDengine with enabling vast worlds and rich narratives—hallmarks of its games—across generations of hardware.
Why Unreal Engine 5, and why now?
The key inspiration to move came from seeing what modern hardware and next-gen tools could deliver at scale. A city-sized real-time showcase, The Matrix Awakens, demonstrated densely populated environments, advanced lighting, and streaming tech that mapped cleanly to the needs of sprawling RPGs. That glimpse of what’s possible, not the past, pushed CD Projekt Red to embrace Unreal Engine 5 for its next Witcher saga and the planned remake of the original Witcher.
Beyond visuals, the team was drawn to UE5’s ecosystem and momentum across the industry. Leveraging a widely adopted engine means faster iteration, broader hiring pools, and access to a growing library of tools and middleware. For a studio building massive open worlds, that baseline matters.
A strategic partnership to shape the tech
CD Projekt Red isn’t just swapping engines; it’s collaborating closely with Epic to extend and harden the specific features its games demand. That includes systems for huge maps, heavy crowd simulation, robust streaming, and narrative-heavy content that must remain stable across PC and consoles. The goal is to align UE5’s roadmap with the realities of 100-hour adventures, not just vertical-slice demos.
Early public glimpses and what they signal
The studio has already offered a brief look at early technology for The Witcher 4 running in UE5, sharing a slice that emphasized environment density, traversal, and next-gen lighting. While it was far from a full reveal, the presentation suggested a focus on world fidelity and performance parity across platforms from the outset—lessons learned from a decade of shipping open worlds on diverse hardware.
Looking forward, not back
For fans, the message is straightforward: the engine transition is about enabling what comes next. REDengine helped define a generation of CD Projekt Red games, but the studio believes a widely supported engine—shaped through direct collaboration—will better sustain its future slate. The Witcher 4 and the remake aim to benefit from faster prototyping, modern rendering pipelines, and a more resilient toolchain for teams spread across multiple projects.
In other words, this isn’t a verdict on the past. It’s a bet that a shared foundation, customized to the studio’s needs, will lead to bigger, denser worlds with smoother development and stronger performance out of the gate. If CD Projekt Red and Epic can deliver on that promise, the next journey into the Continent should feel both familiar and fundamentally more ambitious.
