The co-CEO of CD Projekt Red says the company’s decision to stop using its in-house REDengine and use Unreal Engine 5 for The Witcher 4 instead wasn’t a reaction to Cyberpunk 2077’s infamous launch issues.
REDengine was the proprietary game engine developed by CD Projekt Red for use in its own open-world games. Variations of the engine were used for The Witcher 2 in 2011, The Witcher 3 in 2015 and Cyberpunk 2077 in 2020.
In March 2022, however, the company announced that the next Witcher game was being built with Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5, rather than its own REDengine. Later that year it announced that it was remaking the original Witcher game, also in Unreal Engine 5.
In a new interview with the Deconstructor of Fun podcast, CD Projekt Red co-CEO Michał Nowakowski was asked how the company’s development process changed after the release of Cyberpunk 2077, and whether its performance issues at launch were the main reason it moved to Unreal Engine 5 for The Witcher 4.
“Yes and no”, Nowakowski replied. “A lot of people think like this, but this is a bit of a false assumption, I would say, because the issue with Cyberpunk was not really REDengine itself.”
Nowakowski said that CD Projekt‘s aim was to be a video game company, not a tech company, and while it had used its own engine for its last three major games, that didn’t mean it wasn’t open to using another engine if it could meet its needs.
“The dream of the company was actually never to make technology,” he explained. “It was to, yes, create visually and technically cutting-edge games, but most importantly telling the stories in the most convincing and immersive way.”
Nowakowski: It was The Matrix, not Cyberpunk, that got us to switch to UE5
Nowakowski also stated that it was The Matrix Awakens Unreal Engine 5 tech demo, not the issues suffered by Cyberpunk, that provided the biggest incentive to switch engines.
“It was not the Cyberpunk launch that convinced us to abandon the REDengine and switch completely to to Unreal Engine 5 with the future projects,” he recalled. “It was more the moment we got an early scoop of the Matrix demo that Epic made. We then asked ourselves: ‘Is UE5 ready to ship a game like we make?’
“The answer was ‘no – not at the moment, not at the entry level – but if we form a relationship with Unreal and if we work on certain things which are specifically required to make games of the size and scope and certain technicalities about it that we need for the for the games, it could actually work’.
“And that’s where we came to the table with the guys from Epic. That’s where we made the strategic collaboration.”
Nowakowski added that because CD Projekt Red now works closely with Epic to add new features to Unreal Engine, it still enjoys the ability to adapt the engine to its needs, like it used to with REDengine.
“We’re actually, I think, the only team in the world outside of Epic that deals with the inside of the ‘black box’ that the engine is,” he said. “Nobody else is doing that except for us and them, which we do through collaborative efforts together.
“And by doing so, we feel we’re going to be able to tell more stories and launch more games, because we’re not going to be responsible for creating the technology from scratch, but rather creating for that technology little things that actually make a big difference for the specific kinds of games that we make.”
