The Witcher 4: More efficient production thanks to Unreal Engine 5

It’s no longer a secret that CD Projekt RED is working on a new Witcher trilogy. In an investor call, however, the studio boss commented on the switch to Unreal Engine 5.

We know that a new The Witcher is in the works. Codenamed Project Polaris, it’s set to be the start of a new trilogy, although of course we don’t yet know what it’s about and who the main character will be this time. What is certain, however, is that CD Projekt RED has trashed its in-house RED engine and switched to Unreal Engine 5, for which the problems with Cyberpunk 2077 are certainly not entirely insignificant.

In an investor call, CDPR boss Adam Kiciński has now commented in more detail on the engine change and is optimistic about the future. Accordingly, the studio is currently busy getting used to the new engine and getting used to it. He expects that the development time will not necessarily be accelerated by the new engine, but that the development itself should be much smoother. That is also one of the reasons why the plan is to publish the new trilogy in a period of “only” six years.

“We’re preparing things on the pipeline side and the toolset side. Some developers are still in the process of doing the [Unreal Engine 5]technology and at the same time there are teams working together with Epic on all aspects needed for our open world and story driven RPGs,” he told Wccftech. “For [unser] first project, Polaris, it will…may not slow it down, but it will [Entwicklungs-]Don’t speed up processes. But for the next projects, we expect it will smooth out the production. That’s one of the reasons we said we want to release three big Witcher games within six years, starting with the release of Polaris, which is The Witcher 4.”

The studio had already confirmed last year that a larger team was already working on the pre-production and that it was foreseeable that the Unreal Engine 5 would noticeably improve the efficiency of development. So you can be curious. Partner studio Fool’s Theory, which is currently working on the remake of the first The Witcher, is already using Unreal Engine 5. However, the remake will in all likelihood only appear after the release of Project Polaris aka The Witcher 4.