After the release of Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red has moved entirely to Unreal Engine 5 for its suite of upcoming games: The Witcher 4, Cyberpunk 2, and more. While some have correlated this change with the disastrous launch of the studio’s last release, co-CEO Michał Nowakowski explains that this isn’t necessarily the case.
Right now, The Witcher 4 is deep in development with an expected release date of 2028. Alongside the fantasy RPG, Cyberpunk 2 is currently in early development with over a hundred developers working on the game. (It’s also more-than-likely following the first-person cutscene direction of the first game!)
In an interview with Deconstructor of Fun, Nowakowski explained that Cyberpunk’s release was part of the push towards Unreal Engine 5, but not because the studio’s engine couldn’t support the scale of RPGs it wanted to make.
“Yes and no,” the CEO said. “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.” Instead, the issues stemmed from the fact that CD Projekt Red was not set up to support an engine of that scope in the way they needed to.
“The dream of the company was actually never to make technology,” the CEO continued. “It was to, yes, create visually and technically cutting-edge games, but most importantly, telling the stories in the most convincing and immersive way.”
“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.”
CD Projekt Red co-CEO Michał Nowakowski
Nowakowski revealed that Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5 tech demo of The Matrix Awakens, a realistically-rendered open-world city set within the iconic sci-fi world, is what convinced the team to make the engine switch, not the state of Cyberpunk 2077.
“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. 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 CD Projekt CEO explained that the engine simply wasn’t ready for what they wanted to do. However, the company decided to push for a “strategic collaboration” with Epic to improve the engine and make it more efficient for the types of games that CDPR makes.
“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. 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.”
It’s going to be a long time until we get to see any of Cyberpunk 2, but CD Projekt Red’s first Unreal Engine 5 game will be The Witcher 4. Right now, the game is still in development, but we’ve already seen an impressive tech demo for the game running on a base PS5, and it looks leagues above the rendering capabilities of its predecessor.
