It was no surprise to announce yesterday that CD Projekt RED is working on a new entry in The Witcher series. It’s not an earth-shattering title for a major studio to make a sequel to its hugely successful game. However, one element of the announcement did surprise: the engine switch.
The next wizard – let’s call it The Witcher 4, for convenience and to appease the Google gods – will be developed using Unreal Engine 5. This is astounding, in large part because CD Projekt spent a lot of time building REDengine, their own know-how from the kind of games it had in mind.
It powers most of the studio’s games. The original Witcher ran on the Aurora Engine, the creation of BioWare that also powered Neverwinter Nights and served as the basis for the engine for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. But in The Witcher 2, CD Projekt went ahead with big ambitions. Since then, every subsequent game from the studio has run on the new version of REDengine.
Honestly, I kind of like REDengine, like a “fan” of the technology that makes games possible. The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk — when they function properly — are great-looking games with tons of unique graphical characters. When things are going well, its engine looks top-notch.as John Linneman of DigitalFoundry pointed out on Twitteron PC, REDengine often outperforms Unreal; a huge achievement given the relative size of CD Projekt compared to Epic.
As a huge RPG genre nerd, one of the most exciting things about the engine for me is that it’s a custom engine built for role-playing games. This is the opposite of BioWare’s attempt to revamp an RPG system into Frostbite, an engine built for FPS games – which opens up possibilities. It’s easy to see how REDengine’s work in The Witcher 2 (and then its console and final release) laid the groundwork for making The Witcher 3 an all-time classic. The engine has also proven to be a tuner’s paradise, and ultimately great for gamers too.
Clearly, Unreal Engine can deliver a great RPG. That’s not a problem. UE4 is used in everything from Final Fantasy VII Remake and Borderlands 3 to Torchlight 3, The Outer Worlds, and Octopath Traveler. The Witcher 4 is the second major role-playing game announced with UE5 after Dragon Quest 12 – and BioWare also seems to be returning to the engine, Rumor mill and job postings Implying that the next Mass Effect will ditch Frostbite for UE5. The technology in this engine can build a truly killer role-playing experience.
However… I’m sad to see an indie studio proudly building its own technology, allowing it absolute freedom and control, seems to be starting to abandon the process in favor of partnering with Epic. Perhaps to get away from cyberpunk technology and memory, and to please shareholders by empowering the technology rather than spending a lot of cash to build it. Maybe it’s about working in an internationally-renowned engine, which makes hiring and onboarding more developers faster. There are many good reasons. But it still makes me a little sad.
REDengine has a lot to offer – I don’t think many of cyberpunk’s flaws are to blame for it. It might be a scapegoat now, but as the ever-increasing quality of Cyberpunk 2077 in 2022 and now proves, the engine was never the problem: it was time. The game was rushed; it was that easy.
And then there’s that problem — the problem with Cyberpunk 2077 itself. It continues to improve, and CD Projekt has committed to at least one major DLC release. But when I see a studio starting to move to a different engine, I wonder if cyberpunk will be left behind.
I really hope neither Cyberpunk nor REDengine fall into the dust. Of course, I really want a new wizard. I’m not stupid. But I also really like a lot of what Cyberpunk is after – warts and all – and I really want to see it grow and continue and improve over time. hope so.
