CD Projekt Red recently announced the development of a remake of The Witcher, as well as the start of a brand new saga for the series, which will begin tentatively as The Witcher 4. Both of these games are being developed on Unreal Engine 5 as CD Projekt is ditching its own Red Engine and is instead shifting to widely used Epic Games technology. This will be very useful for both games in general.
The bottom line is this: CD Projekt Red clearly believes that the move to Unreal Engine 5 will lead to better games and better development. CTO Pavel Zavodny said earlier this year that “it was the move to open world support that drew our attention to Unreal Engine 5,” and art director Jakub Knapik added that “Unreal is used by many teams already in the world, many perspectives are projected into the design instruments."
Unreal Engine 5 should make CDPR better at what it already does, and the difficulty of developing and initially releasing Cyberpunk 2077 (of course, things have changed a lot in the last two years) probably played a part in that shift too.
While The Witcher remake is not being developed by CDPR, it is being developed by Polish studio Fool's Theory, which helped develop The Witcher 2 and 3. CDPR says it is "maintaining full creative control" over the project, so it doesn't look like The Witcher 4 and this remake will will be completely separated.
I can pretty much assume that the move to Unreal Engine 5 will help both games, especially since CDPR will have some input on the remake. Can I confirm exactly what form this potential help will take? Of course not, but I believe that there may be some similarities between The Witcher 4 and The Witcher Remake, simply because how one team learns to use Unreal Engine 5 can help the other.
How The Witcher Remake will reimagine and modernize the 2007 original remains to be seen, but it's plausible to speculate that some of how Fool's Theory changes The Witcher could be integrated into The Witcher 4, and vice versa. Does this mean that we will get them faster than we expect, or that both games will be incredibly similar? To be honest, I don't know, I'm just curious to see how developing both games on the same engine at the same time will affect the features, problem solving, and overall quality of each.
CDPR clearly trusts the technology used in Unreal Engine 5, so much so that it wants to merge the development of games in the Witcher series.
Actually, this applies to the Cyberpunk franchise as well, and I think it highlights how CDPR is desperately trying to avoid a Cyberpunk 2077 near-disaster launch situation. While the Phantom Liberty expansion still uses the Red Engine, it will be the last project on it, and the sequel to 2077, codenamed Project Orion, will also move to Unreal Engine 5.
Implementing Unreal Engine 5 on such a large scale is certainly an expensive move, and further demonstrates how much CDPR trusts the technology and how it could impact the games the studio makes in the future.
I think Zavodny's comments about Unreal Engine 5 and what it can offer CDPR for the types of open world games it creates reinforce why this is such an important step not only for the studio's projects, but for its overall image . “This opens a new chapter for us where we want to see how our experience in creating open world games will be combined with all the engineering power of Epic.”
Whatever happens to CD Projekt Red going forward, I really hope the move to Unreal Engine 5 pays off in the end.
