CD Projekt CEO reveals why the company decided to use Unreal Engine for The Witcher 4

Behind the Polish Curtain: CD Projekt Red’s move away from its in-house REDengine in favor of Unreal Engine 5 traces back to late 2021, when Epic unveiled its genuinely impressive Matrix Awakens tech demo. In a recent interview, the company’s co-CEO, Michał Nowakowski, explained how the Polish studio settled on switching engines for its open-world games – noting that CD Projekt was never founded to chase its own technological breakthroughs in the first place.

The next chapter in The Witcher’s fantasy saga won’t run on CD Projekt’s proprietary graphics engine. According to the company’s co-CEO, that decision was actually made years ago, and it’s expected to pave the way for more frequent releases in the saga going forward.

CD Projekt unveiled The Witcher 4 a couple of years ago, confirming that the next entry in its massively popular action-RPG series was being built on Unreal Engine 5. Asked about Cyberpunk 2077’s troubled launch, Nowakowski said people are wrongly assuming the decision to switch engines came as a response to that Cyberpunk-themed fiasco.

Cyberpunk’s issues weren’t related to its engine at all, Nowakowski said, adding that CD Projekt has always focused on building cutting-edge games regardless of what technology powers them. It was only after seeing what UE5 could do in that Matrix demo that the studio began considering Epic’s engine for its future open-world RPG projects.

CD Projekt has been using REDengine for well over a decade. The technology first debuted with The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings in 2011, replacing the Aurora Engine it had licensed from BioWare for the original Witcher. According to Nowakowski, CD Projekt has since entered a strategic partnership with Epic that gives it deeper access to Unreal Engine’s “black box” underlying technology.

Outside of CD Projekt and Epic itself, no one else is apparently doing this kind of development and customization work on the engine, the co-CEO said. The Polish studio is tuning the technology for The Witcher 4 and future projects, contributing a few “little things” meant to give the upcoming ARPG its own identity.

The Witcher 4 isn’t going to look and feel like a “generic” UE5 game, Nowakowski suggests. CD Projekt Red now hopes to release more entries in The Witcher saga on a shorter timeline. Meanwhile, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is getting a free “modern” remaster – for a game that still holds up remarkably well – along with a major new story expansion.