CD Projekt's switch to Unreal wasn't motivated by Cyberpunk 2077's rough launch or a 'This is so bad we need to switch' situation, says senior dev
In an interview with Eurogamer about CD Projekt Red's future, CDPR vice president of technology Charles Tremblay laid out some of the reasoning behind the company's surprise move to Unreal Engine 5 from its in-house REDengine—and it has less to do with Cyberpunk 2077's challenging development and rough launch than you might think.
«The first thing I want to say again, to be sure, 100 percent clear, is that the whole team, myself included, are extremely proud of the engine we built for Cyberpunk,» Tremblay said to Eurogamer. «So it is not about, 'This is so bad that we need to switch' and, you know, 'Kill me now'—that is not true. That is not true, and this is not why the decision was made to switch.»
Rather than a reaction to Cyberpunk's buggy launch and poor initial reception, Tremblay said that the move was meant to pave the way for simultaneous development of multiple games at CDPR. The studio has three in the can right now: The Witcher 4, codenamed Polaris (which has just entered full production), Orion, the next Cyberpunk game, and an original IP codenamed Hadar.
«The way we built stuff in the past was very one-sided, like one project at a time,» Tremblay said. «We pushed the limit—but also we saw that if we wanted to have a multi-project at the same time, building in parallel, sharing technology together, it is not easy.
»The idea was that we can push the technology, we can finally have all the technical people in the company working together on different projects, rather than super centralized into one technology that can very difficultly be shared between other projects."
It makes a lot of sense: A studio developing its own game engine gets the freedom to customize the tools to its exact specifications, as well as the familiarity from having built them from scratch. The risk is that studio has to expend significant resources for both initial development and any subsequent upkeep and upgrades—something alluded to by Skyrim designer Bruce Nesmith when this
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