A few weeks ago, CD Projekt RED announced, to our delight, that the saga The Witcher was going to continue and that the next episode would run on the Unreal Engine 5. The Polish studio, which until then used an in-house engine, explains the reasons for its switch to the Epic engine.
Yesterday, Epic Games held an event, the State of Unreal, in which it took the opportunity to make various announcements and let the developers speak. And, while the Crystal Dynamics teams announced that a new Tomb Raider opus was in development, the CD Projekt RED studio returned to the reasons for the switch to Unreal Engine 5.
L'Unreal Engine 5 : parfait pour The Witcher 4 ?
It probably did not escape you: the announcement of the new The Witcher was accompanied by a change of engine. Jason Slama, the game director of The Witcher 4, spoke about the reasons behind this change, explaining how Epic Games managed to seduce him.
He said, "There was a demo last year, the medieval environment one, where at one point there's a billboard that looks suspiciously like stuff we've done in the past. There's even a sign that says, "We Want A Monster Slayer." »
Jakub Knapik, the art director, notably in charge of lighting, added that the Unreal Engine 5 is a versatile engine that allows great flexibility when it comes to tools. Thus, this choice will give them the possibility of creating very “beautiful” and “realistic” environments in a minimum of time. CD Projekt Red has already expressed that its in-house engine, the REDengine, was particularly complex to understand. The switch to Unreal Engine 5 will therefore allow the studio, beyond saving time, to rely on the stability of Epic Games' engine, and to avoid reproducing the same errors as when launching Cyberpunk 2077. .
If the REDengine will therefore be abandoned for The Witcher license in favor of the Unreal Engine 5, it will continue to accompany Cyberpunk 2077 for its next extensions.
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