CD Projekt Red announced just over a year ago that it had ditched its in-house RED engine and was switching its entire development pipeline to Unreal Engine 5, for the next mainline game of The Witcher. This will be the studio’s first game to be built on top of Epic Games’ development toolset. At a recent earnings call, CD Projekt CEO Adam Kiciński touched on that topic again, offering more insight into how that decision will help the studio move forward.
According to Kiciński, he said (via Wccftech) that the studio is still in the process of getting familiar with the new engine, but while development of the aforementioned Polaris itself hasn’t sped up after the change in engine, it will apparently “smooth out production.” ” of its aftermath. In fact, Kiciński says that switching to Unreal Engine 5 is a big reason why CD Projekt RED previously said it plans to release the entire new Witcher trilogy of games six years apart.
“We are preparing things on the pipeline side and on the toolset side. Some developers are still learning the technology (Unreal Engine 5) and at the same time there are teams working together with Epic on all the aspects that are needed for our open world and story-driven RPGs. Definitely, for (our) first project, Polaris, it will be… It may not slow down, but it won’t speed up the (development) processes. But for the next few projects, we assume that it should smooth out production. That was one of the reasons behind saying we want to release three big Witcher games within six years, starting with the release of Polaris, which is The Witcher 4.”
In May of last year, CDPR confirmed that The Witcher 4 was already in pre-production and had over a hundred people working on it, and that the move to Unreal Engine 5 had already brought greater development efficiencies.
In fact, The Witcher Remake, which will be a fully open world game, is also being developed on Unreal Engine 5 by Fool’s Theory in collaboration with CD Projekt RED, and is expected to be released after Project Polaris.
