Fans have been waiting quite a while for a new Witcher game that isn't a Gwent spinoff, and CD Projekt Red has finally announced the next installment in the popular franchise. Interestingly, the new game will be developed using Unreal Engine 5, something that should be seen as good news to those still shell-shocked after Cyberpunk 2077's disastrous launch.
The next Witcher game will be CDPR's first time using Unreal Engine 5, which is the latest version of Epic Games' massively successful engine. Unreal Engine is the technology behind a large chunk of the games industry, being used in popular titles like Fortnite and Ghostwire: Tokyo. This engine is staunchly trusted within the industry for its cutting-edge technology and reliable ease of use.
Up to now, CD Projekt Red has only ever used its own proprietary game engine, titled REDengine, for the entire Witcher trilogy, as well as for Cyberpunk 2077. Developers tend to rely on their own in-house engines to save the money needed to cut a deal with another engine owner, but sometimes the price is worth paying. CDPR's previous games running on the REDengine have all encountered numerous delays and still shipped with a plethora of technical problems. Cyberpunk 2077 made countless headlines and generated numerous lawsuits thanks to the mountain of bugs with which it launched. It has taken CDPR over a year to finally get Cyberpunk 2077 into an acceptable state, and the decision to build its next game with Unreal Engine 5 could be a good sign that it wants to squash its problematic track record.
Unreal Engine's popularity in the industry could help The Witcher 4 achieve a far more stable launch than any of their prior games. The benefits of a widely shared engine appear in the form of new developers already familiar with how Unreal works joining the project. This cuts down on the learning process and allows developers to build the new game with greater efficiency. Unreal's widespread availability even benefits the developers who aren't as familiar with the engine because of the large amount of resources available to become quickly educated and troubleshoot issues.
Unreal Engine 5 showcases lots of new bells and whistles that will help CDPR bring wide-ranging open worlds to life in a fraction of the time. Epic boasts about a "One File Per Actor" system on their website, which allows multiple developers to work on the same region of the open world in tandem, without fear of overwriting each other's work. Programmers working on regions concurrently will speed up development and hopefully alleviate those delays for which CDPR is infamous.
The new "World Partition" system is also included with Unreal Engine 5, claiming to overhaul how giant worlds are generated by gridding out the world map and only streaming whatever landscapes are essential for players at the moment. This system will help improve gameplay performance, which The Witcher 4 will benefit from immensely after the well-known performance issues that plagued The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077. While most games are still using Unreal Engine 4, players can catch a glimpse of Unreal 5's performance in real time with The Matrix Awakens tech demo.
As incredible as Unreal Engine 5 sounds, CD Projekt Red shifting to a new engine could still bring bad tidings to The Witcher 4. Since most of the developers currently working at CDPR have been using REDengine for as long as the company has been making games, Unreal 5 could cause them major growing pains that could hurt the project itself.
The shift to Unreal echoes Bend Studio's transition. When building the open world of Days Gone, the developers praised Unreal Engine's flexibility, but their inexperience with the program led the game itself to suffer at launch and be notoriously buggy for a first party PlayStation title. Transitioning to Unreal Engine 5 doesn't guarantee that The Witcher 4 will have a polished launch. However, it does prove that CD Projekt Red is willing to make major changes to learn from its mistakes.