CD Projekt Red delighted many by announcing last month that The Witcher 4 is still in development (although it’s not technically called that). The next Witcher game, which starts a new legend, will focus on a different school of Witcher. However, many found the selection of technology supporting this game interesting.
The Witcher 4; It will not use the studio’s proprietary REDengine, which powers Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3. CD Project Red has confirmed that it will use Unreal Engine 5 instead, and now we know why.
Speaking at the Unreal State event held yesterday, CD Projekt Red chief technology officer Paweł Zawodny said, “Our collaboration with Epic has just begun. It was the transition to open world support that caught our attention in Unreal Engine 5. “It opens a new chapter that we really want to see how our experience in developing open world games combines with all of Epic’s engineering power.”
During this talk, Zawodny was joined by CD Projekt Red game director Jasom Slama. Detailing how this collaboration began, Slama said, “There was a demo held last year, it was a medieval environmental demo, at one point there was a notice board that was oddly familiar to what we’ve done in the past. There was even a sign on it that said ‘monster hunter wanted’.” We could say that this sign is an obvious reference to The Witcher, where Geralt of Rivia is collecting business from local bulletin boards.
Apparently this sign caught the team’s attention. Slama continued, “And I was like, ‘Hmm, are they trying to tell us something, come to Unreal Engine, see how great your games can look in there? Was the whole demo made for that purpose? I don’t know, but it definitely caught my attention. ”
Also speaking about the team’s philosophy of open world games, Slama said it’s important to keep in mind the “possibilities of things that can go wrong”, noting that the scenarios you need to consider “are exponentially greater than linear games.” Since players can go in any direction, development requires a “really stable environment” due to the large number of variables. As such, the team needs to make changes without breaking many other things, and using Unreal Engine 5 ensures they have the tools they need.
CD Projekt Red’s artistic director, Jakub Knapik, had a lot of positive things to say about UE5. Describing Unreal Engine as a “toolbox”, Knapik said it offers more flexibility, adding that “there are already many features, many solutions that allow teams to try new things.”
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