CD Projekt has finally gone on record to explain why the new Witcher game uses Unreal Engine 5, as fans immediately speculated why their in-house engine was dropped.
The game was talked up in the recent State of Unreal livestream, where Epic Games showed off Unreal Engine 5 and all of its new bells and whistles. CD Projekt CTO Paweł Zawodny then explained why the new Witcher game uses Unreal Engine 5.
“It was the shift towards open world support that brought Unreal Engine 5 to our attention,” Zawodny said. The CDPR boss then went on to talk up how Unreal Engine 5 is better for world building.
“This opens a new chapter for us where we really want to see how our experience in building open-world games gets combined with all the engineering power of Epic,” he said. He went on to explain that CD Projekt Red and Epic will work together on engine features in order to “achieve something extraordinary in the end.”
CD Projekt game director Jason Slama also talked up how Unreal Engine 5 needed to have the stability to support a vast, varied, open world environment.
“One of the things that is really important to keep in mind when talking about open-world games versus, let’s say, linear games is the possibilities of the things that can go wrong or the scenarios that you have to consider are exponentially higher than linear games,” Slama said.
He added, “Players can go in whatever direction they want, they can handle content in any order that they want theoretically, to really encapsulate that means that you need a really stable environment where you can be able to make changes with a high level of confidence that it’s not going to break in 1,600 other places down the line.”
CD Projekt Art Director Jakub Knapik also chimed in to say since Epic has worked with a number of studios already, there’s lots of good new stuff in Unreal Engine 5, hence the reasoning behind why the new Witcher game uses Unreal Engine 5.
“The fact that Unreal is used by a lot of teams already in the world, a lot of perspectives are projected into the design of the tools and that helps the tool to be way more agile,” Knapik said.
A recent bit of news regarding the new Witcher game is that while it’s being built in Unreal Engine 5 – it won’t be exclusive to the Epic Games Store.
The last main game in the series, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, has been available for Windows PC (via GOG, Origin, and Steam), Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. In case you missed it, you can read our review for the base game here. The game’s next-gen upgrades were also delayed to Q2 2022.
