CD Projekt Red Says The Witcher 4 Unreal Engine 5 Switch Was About Studio Scale, Not REDengine Failure

CD Projekt Red says its decision to abandon REDengine for The Witcher 4 was not driven by the technology failing during Cyberpunk 2077. Instead, the move to Unreal Engine 5 reflects a much larger change in how the studio wants to build games, allowing multiple projects to be developed simultaneously without maintaining an entire proprietary engine around each production.

Joint CEO Michał Nowakowski discussed the decision during a recent Deconstructor of Fun interview, pushing back against the idea that Cyberpunk 2077 convinced CD Projekt Red that REDengine had reached its limits.

"The issue with Cyberpunk was not really REDengine itself."

"The dream of the company was actually never to make technology."
— Quote by: Michał Nowakowski

His point was that CD Projekt Red ultimately wants its engineering work to support storytelling rather than requiring the studio to operate as both a major game developer and a complete engine technology company. The challenge became more significant as CD Projekt Red moved away from developing 1 major game at a time and toward having The Witcher 4, Cyberpunk 2, Project Hadar, and other projects in development simultaneously.

The turning point was reportedly an early look at Epic Games' The Matrix Awakens technology demonstration. CD Projekt Red did not initially believe stock Unreal Engine 5 was ready to support the scale and technical requirements of its RPGs, but saw a path forward through a deeper engineering partnership with Epic rather than continuing to develop every underlying technology internally.

That partnership was announced in 2022 and has since become much more than simply licensing Unreal Engine. CD Projekt Red engineers are modifying and extending the engine alongside Epic specifically for large open world RPG development. The collaboration has already produced technologies such as FastGeo Streaming and work around Nanite Foliage, animation, crowds, and world streaming that will also benefit other Unreal Engine developers.

The clearest demonstration arrived at Unreal Fest 2025, where CD Projekt Red and Epic showed a Witcher themed technology demo running on a standard PlayStation 5 at 60 FPS with hardware ray tracing. The presentation moved Ciri through the forests and populated streets of Kovir while demonstrating FastGeo Streaming, the Unreal Animation Framework, Nanite Foliage, Mass AI crowd scaling, and ML Deformer technology. CD Projekt Red repeatedly stressed that the presentation was a technology demonstration rather than actual The Witcher 4 gameplay.

The studio has also carried knowledge from REDengine into its Unreal Engine work rather than starting from zero. During an earlier technical discussion with Digital Foundry, CD Projekt Red developers explained that years of building open world games with REDengine influence how the team approaches streaming, frame pacing, rendering, and other Unreal Engine systems.

That work is increasingly becoming the technical foundation for several Witcher projects. The Witcher Remake is also being developed with Unreal Engine 5, with some of its development dependent on technology being established through The Witcher 4. CD Projekt Red is also putting substantially more emphasis on console performance earlier in production. Its current process requires technology to pass stricter platform checks before development moves forward.

The Witcher 4 is currently planned for release in 2028, with CD Projekt Red describing it as the first game in a new Witcher saga starring Ciri. The interesting part of CD Projekt Red abandoning REDengine is not that Unreal Engine 5 somehow replaced a broken technology. It is that the studio itself has changed. REDengine made sense when CD Projekt Red concentrated most of its resources around 1 enormous production. Building several AAA projects simultaneously changes that equation. Maintaining rendering, world streaming, animation, platform support, tools, and engine infrastructure internally becomes an enormous parallel workload before developers even start building the game itself.

The Witcher 4 will therefore be the real test of whether CD Projekt Red can preserve the distinctive design and technical identity of its previous games while relying on a shared external engine underneath.

Do you think moving to Unreal Engine 5 will help CD Projekt Red release games more consistently, or are you worried its future titles could lose some of the identity REDengine gave them?