New "The Witcher" game with Unreal Engine 5: CDPR and Epic in love

This is an article from our content partner "PC Games Hardware". Here you can find the original article by author Thilo Bayer.

The week starts with quite a bang for all fans of CD Projekt Red: In a press release, the Polish developer and publisher has announced a new "The Witcher" game. The new project in the fantasy world doesn't have a name or a release window yet, but it relies on a game engine that probably nobody expected.

CDPR and Epic enter into a multi-year partnership

Since 2011 and thus "The Witcher 2", CDPR has been using the in-house RED engine, which was also used in different and further developed versions for "The Witcher 2 Enhanced" (RED Engine 2), "The Witcher 3" (RED Engine 3) and "Cyberpunk 2077" (RED Engine 4). This is now over, at least for future projects. As CDPR explains in the press release, they will continue to develop the Unreal Engine 5 for their own needs together with Epic. Topics like quests in an open world are likely to play an important role.

In April 2021, CD Projekt Red still talked about wanting to achieve parallel triple-A game productions and that the in-house RED engine should play an important role in this. The RED engine technology should be improved, and parts of the employees should then be active as interdisciplinary teams for both brands at the same time. These plans have been thrown overboard for the upcoming games. The emphasis is on "upcoming games", because for "Cyberpunk 2077" and its future expansions, the RED engine will be retained. The next-gen version of "The Witcher 3" will probably also continue to rely on the in-house engine. According to the latest plan, the Geralt overhaul should be released in the second quarter, but this info is still from the end of November 2021. But what exactly does CD Projekt Red plan to do with The Witcher universe in the future?

What exactly CD Projekt Red plans to do with "The Witcher" universe is not yet known. However, CDPR has made it clear several times that "The Witcher" and "Cyberpunk" are the two big brands and cornerstones for the company. It has been clear for some time that CD Projekt Red will return to "The Witcher", but not in the form of "The Witcher 4", since "The Witcher" is completed as a trilogy. However, they had already set the course for further Witcher games at the end of December 2019 by agreeing on a new collaboration with book author Andrzej Sapkowksi.

For Epic, the collaboration with CDPR should be a major prestige win. Epic first made Early Access of Unreal Engine 5 available to interested users at the end of May 2021. Since then, there have always been impressive demos from external parties and ultimately also the UE5 beta for "Fortnite" from Epic itself - and of course not to forget the extremely impressive UE5 demo "The Matrix Awakens" and most recently the survival game "Rooted" with UE5. At the end of February, they released Preview 1 for UE5, with the full version scheduled for release later this spring. A cooperation with CDPR as a promotion for the engine is just right.

CD Projekt Red must have carefully weighed up whether to continue developing the RED engine or to work with an engine provider like Epic. The effort for the further development of the engine has probably increased recently, with the RED Engine 3 it would not have been possible to develop "Cyberpunk 2077" because of features like first person or the verticality of the game world. The problems with backwards compatibility to old consoles might also have played a role in the decision. Paweł Zawodny, CTO of CDPR, at least admits that "in the past they spent a lot of resources and energy on developing and adapting the REDengine with each new game release".