The Witcher’s Polish development team replaces REDengine with Unreal Engine 5 in partnership with Epic Games.

The Polish company has signed a cooperation agreement with Epic Games and will now use Unreal Engine 5 instead of its own REDengine. The first announcements only said that this merger will benefit both teams, the new engine will work better in CD Projekt’s open world games.

The new The Witcher is one of the biggest announcements so far this year for video games, but CD Projekt RED has been very cautious with the information. So far, we’ve only seen one image, and it’s been confirmed that a new saga will begin, and that the graphics engine will be replaced.

The community is puzzled by this, as their own engine has given really impressive performance in games like The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077. However, it is also true that the developers have suffered a lot from bugs. It seems that this is the reason that motivated the change, at least as the studio itself revealed in its article on The State of Unreal:

“We need a really stable environment,” said Pawel Zawodny, the company’s chief technology officer.

“The open world support offered by Unreal Engine 5 has caught our attention. It opens a new chapter for us, combining our experience in open world gaming with Epic’s engineering power,” he said.

Zawodny hopes to “achieve something extraordinary” when the final product arrives. Art director Jakub Knapik hinted at the possibilities offered by the new engine: “The fact that a lot of studios are using Unreal helps us design tools and makes them much easier to use.”

Game director Jason Slama also had a few words to say about the partnership between Epic Games and CD Projekt, pointing out that

“Open world games need a stable engine.”

As for the new The Witcher, the Polish company is still waiting on an official name, with The Witcher 4 still a matter of conjecture.

Source: PC Gamer