CD Projekt Red joint CEO Michał Nowakowski has explained why the studio moved The Witcher 4 from its in-house REDengine to Unreal Engine 5, and he says the messy Cyberpunk 2077 launch wasn’t the trigger. Speaking on the Deconstructor of Fun podcast, he called the idea that REDengine caused Cyberpunk’s problems a mistaken assumption. He revealed that the switch instead came after an early look at Epic’s The Matrix Awakens tech demo. Here’s what he said:”It was not the Cyberpunk launch that convinced us to abandon the REDengine and switch completely to Unreal Engine 5 with the future projects. It was more the moment we got an early scoop of the Matrix demo that Epic made. We then asked ourselves: ‘Is UE5 ready to ship a game like we make?’ And that’s where we came to the table with the guys from Epic. That’s where we made the strategic collaboration.”
Nowakowski also expects the studio to tell more stories and launch more games now that it no longer builds the tech from scratch, and has said before that further games should arrive on a shorter timeline. He also thinks CDPR is the only team besides Epic working inside the engine’s “black box,” so it can tweak UE5 to its needs. The Witcher 4 is set to launch at some point in 2028. Nowakowski has also previously clarified that The Witcher 4 won’t look like a generic Unreal Engine 5 game. Of course, we won’t know how UE5 performs until the game ships, but the studio seems to be aware of the challenges ahead of them.
