The Witcher will be an open world game that will use the Unreal Engine 5 engine, leaving CD Projekt Red’s REDengine aside. The reasons for this decision here!
Open world games are becoming more and more common in the industry, so much so that since CD Projekt Red they will launch a The Witcher that way. The truth is that making open world games is more complex than linear games, so a better engine is needed. Precisely for this reason, the developer explained the reason for the switch from REDengine to Unreal Engine 5.
In the last State of Unreal, the CTO of CD Projekt Red, Pawel Zawodnysaid that the real interest in Unreal Engine 5 was given for the possibility of creating an open world The Witcher. In addition, he referred to the collaboration of the developer with Epic Games to work on your project, which will result in a “new saga”. In his words, Zawodny commented: “This opens a new chapter for us where we really want to see how our experience building open world games is combined with all of Epic’s engineering might.”.
On the other hand, Jakub Knapikart director of CD Projekt Redstated that many of the ideas of Unreal Engine 5 they are already shaped. For this reason, the developer would benefit from the designs of other users of Unreal.
Jason Slama, director of the new The Witcherreferred to the advantages of using the engine of Unreal Engine 5. “One of the things that’s really important to keep in mind when you’re talking about open world games versus, let’s say, linear games, is the possibility of things going wrong or the scenarios you have to consider are exponentially bigger than linear games.”explained Slama.
The importance of using this engine lies in the confidence of knowing that the game can support user decision making. This means that regardless of which path the player travels first, the game’s story will remain stable.