Yesterday’s announcement that CD Projekt RED is working on a new title in The Witcher series was hardly a surprise. Big studio works on sequel to their massively successful game is not an earth-shattering headline. One element of the announcement did come as a surprise, however: an engine switch.
This next Witcher – let’s just call it The Witcher 4, for the sake of ease and to appease the Google Gods – will be developed using Unreal Engine 5. That’s a shocker, in large part because CD Projekt has spent a great deal of time building REDengine, their own proprietary technology that has been built from the ground up with the sort of games it makes in mind.
It’s powered most of the studio’s games. The original Witcher ran on the Aurora Engine, a BioWare creation that also powered Neverwinter Nights and became the foundation of the engine of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. But by The Witcher 2, CD Projekt had moved on with great ambition. Since then, each successive game by the studio has run on a new iteration of REDengine.
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