CD Projekt RED is no longer developing The Witcher 4 on its proprietary REDengine; the team has switched to Unreal Engine 5. Many players had assumed the move stemmed from the troubled launch of Cyberpunk 2077. Co-CEO Michał Nowakowski now dismisses that idea and points to a different factor behind the technical shift.
Instead, he credits the impressive tech demo The Matrix Awakens with convincing the studio of Unreal Engine 5’s potential. He also insists that the issues with Cyberpunk 2077 did not stem directly from the REDengine.
Cyberpunk 2077 Was Not the Decisive Reason
Cyberpunk 2077 launched in late 2020 in a technically troubled state. The console versions suffered from crashes, graphical glitches, and, in some cases, severe performance drops. Sony even temporarily removed the role-playing game from the PlayStation Store.
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When CD Projekt RED later announced it would switch to Unreal Engine 5 for The Witcher 4, the connection seemed obvious. Many observers assumed the studio wanted to move away from its own technology after the Cyberpunk 2077 launch. In a new interview, however, Michał Nowakowski clarified that this assumption is only partially true. The launch issues were not fundamentally caused by the REDengine, so the switch was not a direct attempt to abandon it. CD Projekt RED sees itself first and foremost as a game developer and does not want to permanently allocate significant resources to engine development. The studio aims to create technically sophisticated games and tell compelling stories.
The Matrix Awakens Changed the Plans
According to Nowakowski, The Matrix Awakens provided the decisive impetus. As early as 2021, the Epic Games tech demo showed what Unreal Engine 5 could do for large, detailed worlds. CD Projekt RED gained early access to the demo. That insight sparked internal debates about whether Unreal Engine 5 could handle the scale and technical demands of a new Witcher title. At first, the answer was no; in its original state, the engine did not meet the studio’s expectations. At the same time, the team saw the engine’s potential. Those factors led to the long-term partnership with Epic Games. CD Projekt RED is not simply using Unreal Engine 5 off the shelf; both companies are collaborating on features and customizations for large open-world games.
CD Projekt Secures Unusually Deep Access
According to Nowakowski, CD Projekt RED enjoys unusually deep access to the engine’s technology. The team collaborates with Epic on components that usually remain locked in a technical “black box” for other developers. This approach preserves a key advantage of the studio’s own REDengine. CD Projekt can still tailor the tech to its RPG needs without shouldering the entire underlying development and maintenance load. This partnership could be especially crucial for a project like *The Witcher 4*. The role-playing game aims to blend a vast open world with many characters, complex systems, and high-end visuals. Meanwhile, the studio plans to develop several major titles in parallel.
Maintaining a custom engine for every major project ties up many specialists, so with Unreal Engine 5, CD Projekt can lean on an existing foundation and direct more resources toward the games themselves.
Lessons learned from Cyberpunk 2077 remain important, however.
However, this new statement does not mean that the launch of Cyberpunk 2077 has no influence on the development of The Witcher 4. The problematic release led to several changes within the studio. These changes, however, relate more to development and quality assurance processes than to the fundamental choice of engine. CD Projekt RED is already testing the new role-playing game on the intended platforms during ongoing production. The Witcher 4 is already running internally on PS5, rather than being ported to console hardware only near launch. With Cyberpunk 2077, the team focused on the PC build for a long time, making the console port much harder. The studio aims to avoid that mistake this time.
The move to a new engine and the workflow changes should be viewed separately. According to Nowakowski, Unreal Engine 5 was not selected because REDengine caused the Cyberpunk debacle. However, the lessons learned from that console launch are shaping how CD Projekt develops and tests its new major project.
Unreal Engine 5 is intended to enable more games
The switch also supports a long-term goal: CD Projekt RED plans to run multiple productions at once. Alongside The Witcher 4, the team is developing a new Cyberpunk game, a remake of the original The Witcher, and a largely unknown new franchise. A shared technical foundation could streamline collaboration among the teams. Developers won’t need to build new internal tools for every project or adapt existing tech with great effort. Whether this approach delivers more stable launches will become clear only when the games are complete. Unreal Engine 5 does not automatically guarantee better performance or a bug-free launch, but it gives CD Projekt a broader technical foundation and lets the studio collaborate with Epic on required features.
For PlayStation players, the most important factor remains how well The Witcher 4 performs on actual console hardware. The fact that the PS5 version is being taken into account during development is likely at least as important as the name of the engine being used. Source: YouTube. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
