CD Projekt Red won’t be using REDengine for The Witcher 4, but the developer’s vice president of technology has made it clear the engine isn’t why Cyberpunk 2077 suffered.
It’s pretty rare for most developers to use their own engines. Square Enix long struggled with its Luminous Engine, the one Final Fantasy 15 was made in, for example, and Kingdom Hearts 3 even started off there before making the switch to Unreal Engine. CD Projekt Red too made the decision to develop The Witcher 4, or whatever it’s called, in Unreal Engine 5, leading some to suspect that the developer wants to avoid another Cyberpunk situation. But in a new interview from Eurogamer with Charles Tremblay, the VP of technology made it clear that the change isn’t because of the developer not liking its own engine.
“I know a lot of people are curious about it, so I’ll try to explain,” Tremblay said, noting that it’s been a “very polarising question in general, for the company and for everyone.” The developer shared that despite what many believe, REDengine wasn’t the main reason as to why Cyberpunk 2077 had such a difficult development, or even the main reason why CD Projekt Red is moving to Unreal Engine. “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. 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.”
Tremblay said it was simply because it wants to have multiple projects in development at once, i.e. this upcoming Witcher game, Cyberpunk’s sequel codenamed Orion, and a completely new IP codenamed Hadar. “The way we built stuff in the past was very one-sided, like one project at a time. 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.”
He went on to say that “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 centralised into one technology that can very difficultly be shared between other projects.”
It obviously still remains to be seen whether the next Witcher game even has a smooth development or not, the game only started production this month after all, but hopefully as Tremblay notes being able to have the technical side of the devs working more collaboratively will make it a bit easier.