CD Projekt Red Explains Why It's Using Unreal Engine 5 for The Witcher 4

gamerant.com:

Epic Games recently had a live stream event named “The State of Unreal 2022” in which it highlighted several developers that are using Unreal Engine 5 to make games, along with showcasing how developing with the engine can make games look and play better. CD Projekt Red took part in this stream and gave some subtle insight into the development process of the nextWitcher game. CDPR had recently announced it was switching from its own in-house game engine to Unreal Engine 5 to make the next highly anticipated game in the Witcher series.

The Witcher developer had already developed its own game engine named REDengine. This engine was used in multiple CDPR projects, most recently for Cyberpunk 2077, and is still being used for the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 DLC.

Unreal Engine 5 Available to All Developers Now

It is unusual for a developer with its own in-house engine to switch to a third-party engine, especially for a signature property as lucrative as The Witcher series. CD Projekt Red used its time in The State of Unreal developer showcase to explain why it had made the switch to Unreal Engine for the next Witcher game. The decision to change engines came down to Unreal Engine 5’s new focus on open world game design rather than the linear games which earlier iterations of Unreal saw the most success with.

As CD Projekt RED is famous for making large, open-world RPGs with many scenario-altering choices for the player to make in almost every mission and side quest, the developer really emphasized the importance of building such games on stable and reliable engines. Though never explicitly mentioned in the live stream, the fact thatCyberpunk 2077 was a game plagued with bugs and glitches since its infamous release back in 2020,