CD Projekt afrima Unreal Engine 5 to facilitate development for upcoming The Witcher trilogy

CD Project RED announced just over a year ago that it had ditched its in-house RED engine and was switching its entire development pipeline to Unreal Engine 5, for the next mainline game of The Witcher. This will be the studio’s first game to be built on top of Epic Games’ development toolset. At a recent earnings call, CD Projekt CEO Adam Kiciński touched on that topic again, offering more insight into how that decision will help the studio move forward.

According to Kiciński, he said (via Wccftech) that the studio is still in the process of familiarizing itself with the new engine, but although the development of the aforementioned Polaris itself hasn’t sped up after the change in engine, apparently it will “smooth out production” of its sequels. In fact, Kiciński says that switching to Unreal Engine 5 is a big reason why CD Projekt RED previously said that it plans to release the entire new trilogy of games from The Witcher six years apart.

“We are preparing things on the pipeline side and on the toolset side. Some developers are still learning the technology [Unreal Engine 5] and, at the same time, there are teams that work together with Epic on all the aspects that are needed for our open-world, story-driven RPGs. Definitely, for [nuestro] first project, Polaris, will be… It may not slow down, but it will not speed up processes [de desarrollo]. But for the next few projects, we assume that it should smooth out production. That was one of the reasons behind saying we want to release three big Witcher games within six years, starting with the release of Polaris, which is The Witcher 4.”

In May of last year, CDPR confirmed that The Witcher 4 it was already in pre-production and had over a hundred people working on it, and that the switch to Unreal Engine 5 had already brought greater development efficiencies.

In fact, The Witcher Remakewhich will be a fully open world game, is also being developed on Unreal Engine 5 by Fool’s Theory in collaboration with CD Projekt RED, and is expected to be released later of the Polaris Project.