CD Projekt RED has officially confirmed the existence of a new title based on The Witcher. In an announcement that reveals no concrete information on the game itself, the focus is very much on technology. The firm’s in-house REDengine is being mothballed in favour of Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5. CDPR talks of a ‘multi-year strategic partnership… [covering] not only licensing, but technical development of Unreal Engine 5, as well as potential future versions of Unreal Engine where relevant’. In essence, CDPR has chosen to throw in its lot with Epic Games, even though core Unreal Engine 5 technologies are still at an early state, with the firm helping to shape the tech ‘with the primary goal being to help tailor the engine for open-world experiences’. We’re at the embryonic stages here as no development time frame or release dates are being shared at this time.
It’s a seismic shift for the Polish developer, which has shipped all of its titles from The Witcher 2 onwards on its own engine – but to be clear, while the REDengine’s days are numbered, it is still the core foundation of Cyberpunk 2077, so the upcoming expansion for that title will still be based on the same technology. Beyond that, however, it seems that Unreal Engine 5 is the future.
From the perspective of the staff members at Digital Foundry, this is not the best news and while it’s clear that there are reasons why CDPR has moved on, the end of development on a hugely impressive independent engine is a blow. After all, REDengine in its various guises has produced a visually unique presentation that has undoubtedly helped to shape some brilliant games. Going all the way back to The Witcher 2, CDPR delivered a title quite unlike any other that genuinely pushed back barriers – a game that still looks brilliant today. Environment detail, lighting, character rendering and post-processing were well ahead of their time. The Witcher 2 launched during the PS3/Xbox 360 era yet from a technological perspective, it was a class apart, a generation beyond.
While it’s clear that Cyberpunk 2077 has suffered from a range of technical problems, from our perspective, the PC version has always been performant and scalable, and always delivered the absolute state of the art in game visuals from day one. Bugs were undoubtedly an issue across the board, but the vast bulk of the technical problems centred on the last-gen console renditions of the game. Graphical aspects are inherently scalable – whether you’re talking about features, the quality of those features or the native rendering resolution.