CD Projekt Red explained why it decided to turn to Unreal Engine 5 to develop the next The Witcher game instead of its game engine, REDengine 4.
The studio made a point of being represented at the official launch of Unreal Engine 5 through Paweł Zawodny, the company’s CTO. He explained that “the move to the open-world drew the studio’s attention to Unreal Engine 5.”
“This opens a new chapter for us where we want to see how our experience in developing open-world games combines with all of Epic’s engineering power,” he said. Zawodny hopes to achieve “something extraordinary” with this collaboration.
Jakub Knapik, art director at CD Projekt Red, highlighted that the Unreal Engine is used by several studios worldwide, something that will benefit the company in his eyes. “The fact that Many teams worldwide use unreal, many perspectives are projected into the design of the tools, which helps them be much more agile.”
Game director Jason Slama also mentioned that open-world games require a pretty solid game engine due to the number of variables, suggesting that Unreal Engine 5 delivers a considerable level of stability.
“One thing that is important to keep in mind when talking about open-world games compared to linear games is the possibilities for things to go wrong or the scenarios you should consider are exponentially greater than in linear games,” said Slama. “Players can go in any direction; they can handle content in any order they theoretically want, and encapsulating that means you need a stable environment where you can make changes with a high level of confidence that it won’t error on 1,600 other sites in the future.”
The new Witcher game was recently announced, and little is known about it.
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