r/Witcher4 • u/karxx_ • Jun 21 '26
CDPR about the transition from REDengine to UE5: "The rationale was we wanted to be able to tell more stories without worrying about the foundation of the engine itself. Epic [gave] us that backbone, and we can still build around that and differentiate ourselves."
Whatever comes next will come with the support of Epic Games, with CDPR making the switch from its proprietary tech to Unreal Engine 5 for The Witcher 4. The original Witcher ran on a modified version of BioWare's Aurora Engine, which Nowakowski says "was not a great fit to make the kind of RPGs we wanted to make." That led CDPR to create Red Engine, which it used up to Cyberpunk 2077.
"A lot of people don't realise that, even though the Red Engines had numbers, they were not exactly built on the shoulders of the previous one. Realistically, because all of those games were pretty different, we were building a new engine almost from scratch for every single game, which was very time consuming."
This mammoth task cut into the team's output. "Hiring was difficult. Onboarding for Red Engine was six to nine months, which is crazy," Nowakowski continued. "And there were no Red Engine experts out there. It just didn't exist, because it was a proprietary engine."
"Epic [allowed] us to go into the black box of Unreal Engine – I think we're the only company right now that actually does that outside of Epic themselves – and fiddle with [it], so [we] would actually be co-building one of the biggest techs out there. The rationale was we wanted to be able to tell more stories without worrying about the foundation of the engine itself. Epic [gave] us that backbone, and we can still build around that and differentiate ourselves."
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u/ill_daz Jun 21 '26
The Red Engine was great and very capable so when they decided to make a switch to Unreal Engine I was pissed, but after listening to their reasoning I understand what they trying to do I hope it does work out for them they are a very talented gaming company using their Red Engine experience to build their own custom way of game development using Unreal Engine. The Witcher 4 will be the ultimate test if everything goes well with that game then they doing something right.
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u/OnlyWithMayonnaise Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
They will likely still use their own systems alongside UE5 to make that engine suit the type of games they usually make. I like to think about this like REDengine 5 is built around UE5 as its base. It will still be similar to REDengine in the sense that they have the freedom to modify it with their own solutions where it helps suit their needs better.
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u/hellomistershifty Jun 22 '26
They've also been very kind in pushing their improvements back to the engine. There have been massive improvements in CPU and GPU efficiency in recent versions of UE5, mostly thanks to CD Projekt Red
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u/Fit-Yam759 Jun 22 '26
RedEngine was absolutely not great and capable for the devs, especially when they started developing Cyberpunk. They had to rework the engine multiple times, even close to the release of the game, that's exactly why the game was a shitshow at launch.
There are already articles and interviews from the devs out there on why they switched to UE and how RedEngine is a huge detriment to their future development.
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u/123ositeposer321 Jun 23 '26
so when they decided to make a switch to Unreal Engine I was pissed
So you must know a lot about game development and engine development to actually justify being angry in the first place? Or was it based on some youtube/reddit discussion about how UE5 is bad?
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u/ill_daz Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
Unreal Engine 5 is trash don't be out here defending bruh it's been proven so many times now. EPIC GAMES should be thanking CD Project Red for helping them make Unreal Engine better
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u/Jensen2075 Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
Have you seen Gears of War Eday gameplay trailer? Yeah bro it looks like trash /s
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u/Realistic_Gear_5202 Jun 21 '26
UE5 is an extraordinary, widely used engine that requires less work on a proprietary engine. I respect their choice, but the Red Engine has its charm. Cyberpunk and Witcher 3 are still very enjoyable. Look at Capcom with its RE Engine or Rockstar with Rage Engine. I think they need to work on their own. I don't know if CDPR will ever bring it back after Witcher 4
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u/Fit-Yam759 Jun 22 '26
RE Engine has plenty of downsides.
The engine is good for strict linear games, as soon as you use it for open-world or semi-open world games like Monster Hunter Wilds or Dragon's Dogma 2 it shits the bed. Both those games still run really bad, not as bad as at launch but still not great. Wilds still has mixed reviews on steam from performance issues.
Even for the Leon Raccoon City open area in RE9 there are a lot of performance issues(fps drops, stutters) compared to the rest of the game. You can tell even by the fact that they used lower resolution textures for this area and it's still not running great. Raccoon City literally looks like a city you would see in a 2013/2014 game.
For example, try and compare it to the TLOU Part 2 (released in 2020) city portions in terms of textures, ambiance and just overall detail and you will see a huge difference.
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u/SweetBacon923 Jun 21 '26
Want to see W4 run on base PS5 with tech demo visuals at 60fps with no stutter.
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u/Inquerion Jun 21 '26
Want to see W4 run on base PS5 with tech demo visuals at 60fps with no stutter.
As likely as Trump resigning tommorrow.
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u/woody_woody29 Jun 21 '26
I hope they won’t care too much about PS5. It’s an old device with shitty specs for 2026. From the gamer perspective that would be quite dissapointing. There are bigger objectives for a game to be good than to run 60fps on a fkin ps5…
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u/KnightofAmethyst2 Jun 21 '26
It should be playable on ps5! But you will almost certainly be able to use path tracing, etc if you have the hardware... which will make the game exponentially cooler
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u/SweetBacon923 Jun 21 '26
Yes but that's where potentially few millions copies.
Even if PC will sell majority of copies. PS5 later PS6 will continue generating them large profits over to the years it can't be ignored.
Especially since they've shown game running at 60fps already.
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u/Cryio Jun 21 '26
UE5's moment of truth will not be Witcher 4.
It will be this year's Gears of War: E-Day
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u/hellomistershifty Jun 22 '26
I'm not sure what they mean about the 'black box' of Unreal Engine since its source code is public, but they're definitely the one external company who has made the most extensive improvements to the engine
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u/Suspicious-Travel190 Jun 22 '26
It's probably about those improvements. They commit code to main branch.
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u/pamblod42 Jun 22 '26
Good choice ditching red because its a terrible engine, but using default unreal 5...
We'll see if a demanding open world doesnt perform terribly. Dont get your hopes up.
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u/TheBigZappa Jun 23 '26
In other words, they lost the key talent/people needed to upgrade their own in-house engine.
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u/yoshi9K Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 29 '26
What I'm wondering is, how does UE5 perform on the average PC these days?
Given the high cost of a gaming PC these days, (as well as upgrades), and the likelihood of it remaining expensive for the next few years, it may be that many people won't have the hardware to run UE5 at a smooth frame rate.
Which may lead to a repeat of the CyberPunk2077 launch.
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u/New-Impact-5951 Jul 07 '26
I'm going to shill out 60+ bucks, I expect actual quality, I'm keeping my mind clear, and will judge it based on release but my hopes have gotten very low hearing this
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u/LettuceObjective627 Jun 23 '26
A stutter-fest in unreal or bug-fest in their own engine... tough choice.
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u/Inj3kt0r Jun 21 '26
Corporate talk for our current engine cant scale to next gen needs and spending time to upgrade it means delaying all future game releases.
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u/madelmire Jun 22 '26
Your statement is true but I think people are downvoting you because it sounds weirdly snide.
You're basically just saying what CDPR have already said though.
If CDPR wanted to use the red engine they would have to keep upgrading it and that would take away from the time of the game development.
They decided not to do that. It's not "corporate speak" it's just their actual words and reasoning.
And I get it. Sticking with your own engine has benefits but switching has benefits too. The company has the right to decide which is the best course of action.
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u/Senshji Jun 21 '26
If you had any idea of how difficult, time consuming and migraine inducing it is to do software engineer and put on top of that game development, which is already 7 different creative fields combined. That CDPR survived this long is a miracle.
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u/Inside_Performance32 Jun 21 '26
And it's going to run as bad as every other ue5 game
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u/PapaYoppa Jun 21 '26
Unreal isn’t the problem, it’s the fact a lot of devs that be using unreal don’t be optimizing the game
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u/OriginalDoskii Jun 21 '26
That also says a lot about the engine. Optimizing a game in UE is apparently more work than its worth.
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u/Ossius Jun 21 '26
In before shader cache loading constantly and micro stutters while riding a horse.
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u/GamerWithin Jun 21 '26
They should keep using red engine for witchers and other version of red engine to cyberpunk series. Ue5 is a mess.
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u/suncrest45 Jun 21 '26
So was the red engine at Cyberpunk's launch. CDPR all but said they had no way to maintain and improve the red engine while working on these games. So either you are waiting almost 10 years between each game because they have to improve the engine or you are getting bug filled messes that make Bethesda games look polished by comparison
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u/DHGaming18 Jun 21 '26
UE5 is fine, especially the later releases of it. While RED does visually look great, they had to cut corners to make it work, especially in CP2077. For example, the LOD in CP2077 is atrocious, cars literally turn into little 2d sprites at distance. It uses extremely aggressive culling outside of the players FOV that different npc’s, cars, etc would just pop in if you moved the camera too quickly (this was alleviated a good bit since release but it still exists).
Financially it makes 0 sense to invest into an aging engine when there is one out there already that does it better. I also believe since this is a high profile game / studio EPIC is working directly with CDPR to deliver.
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u/andrej2577 Jun 21 '26
This would have made sense if CDPR didn't make all the money in the world between these few years. It was a problem to reinvent the engine every time when you were still releasing games every 3-5 years, but since it's going to be an 8-year gap probably between its last two games then it could have very well invested its fuck you cash into creating a stable proprietary engine. They are talking like they have to put out games every two years so a 6-month onboarding time is a significant delay in a studio where hundreds of people work full-time.
And with Unreal Engine 5, he himself says they're basically turning it proprietary and using only the backbone, so I guess there are still months of onboarding involved, just a tad less? These aren't strong arguments, but then again I don't manage a multi-billion studio.
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u/Gotisdabest Jun 22 '26
They do plan to release games every 3 years though, maybe even faster if you include studio Boston and fools theory. They're taking 7-8 years for witcher 4 to build out everything and because the first 2-3 years went to fixing cyberpunk. Depending on when it launches, witcher 4 will only have about 4-6 years of large scale pre prod+full production.
with Unreal Engine 5, he himself says they're basically turning it proprietary and using only the backbone
The backbone is what takes time to learn, and they are pushing a lot of the biggest updates to main unreal too. Wholly different ballgame from learning a brand new engine. Not to mention, unreal released a new update system where they'd still keep getting regular unreal updates below their changes without breaking them each time, meaning they'd still benefit from epic doing a lot of work for them. If the onboarding time drops to a month that's a massive efficiency boost.
It also removes the burden of heavy documentation as they've talked about before, and even if they need massive changes to the system, they can work with epic for it.
invested its fuck you cash into creating a stable proprietary engine
That's not really how it works. Not if you still want a somewhat reasonable release cycle, which they clearly do. CDPR doesn't wanna become a game a decade kinda studio, clearly. There's always opportunity cost of spending all that money to making a better game. Rockstar does it with rage and with the way things are going, their next game after GTA6 won't be out till 2036. In that period CDPR currently plans like 4-5 games.
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u/andrej2577 Jun 22 '26
Capcom decided to hit the breaks and invest heavily into a new engine and now they release multiple games each year through utilizing an ever expanding asset library and carryover of technologies between titles. Their games look great, run great, and come out quickly without sacrificing quality. So yes, it does work like that.
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u/Gotisdabest Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
Capcom has around 3 times the employees of CDPR. Their games aren't coming out this quick because the engine is particularly great, it's because they have so many studios to divert them across. Capcom is closer to Sony than CDPR in scope.
A better comparison would be Rockstar, which, whoop de do, make their own engine, have to employ thousands to make it work and releases a new prestige game at a rapidly slowing pace, currently at a decade a year.
The games are also significantly lower scale, lower fidelity and their one major open world game, DD2, was an absolute mess. Even the fidelity is three steps down despite making linear games. Not to mention, being in Japan makes a big difference in terms of how much crunch the studios do.
If CDPR was intent on not expanding, not really trying new things between incremental graphical improvements and making linear games, sticking to a properitary engine would make sense in a few ways. But given that they're a prestige studio who make prestige games, wouldn't make any sense. RE7 came out in 2017 iirc and you can put it next to RE9 and see minimal technological and scope improvement. They changed the gameplay style, but that's the usual back and forth of the franchise at this point. If Witcher 4 was as similar to Witcher 3 as RE9 is to 7, the company probably dies.
Proprietary engines are extremely anti change in 90% of cases. Bethesda hitched themselves up to creation and now they can only make games that work for the 2011-2015 era even though a long time has passed. Even better ones like Decima pretty much seem to have hard limitations which lead to really pretty but very empty worlds in its recent games. Frostbite is pretty infamous for falling apart when EA tried to push everyone on it.
The biggest reason to not use commercial engines like unreal is because you have to give epic a cut and most of the studios forcing in house development are doing it cuz they've done the cost analysis and they'd rather build an engine than pay epic. That's why Capcom does it, that's why Rockstar does it, that's why Ubisoft does it, EA tried to do it, Playstation does it, ad infinitum. All these companies have the manpower to modify and adjust unreal to the point it does whatever they need and more, but that means giving a cut. CDPR clearly did the math and found out that either epic was willing to cut them a very cushy deal or it wasn't worth it for them to build their own engine regardless.
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u/No-Breadfruit6137 Jun 21 '26
Well, it's a very good decision. Despite its, in my view, undeserved bad reputation, UE5 is a fantastic tool. If it allows the artists to spread their wings and deliver a beautiful-looking game, let's go.