Last month CD Projekt RED announced new game in The Witcher franchise. There is almost no information about the title – it is only known that it will be a “new saga”, and on the poster flaunts Lynx school medallion. At the same time, the developers immediately announced that they would not use the proprietary REDengine engine, but the newfangled Unreal Engine 5.
The studio explained its choice in a short video. In fact, there is no secret here – the developers preferred UE5 because of its flexibility, stability and opportunities for creating an open world.
It was the support for the open world that drew our attention to Unreal Engine 5. This opens a new chapter for us, in which we want to see how our experience in creating open world games will be combined with all the engineering strength of Epic.
Pavel Zavodny, CTO of CDPR
One of the things that’s really important to keep in mind when talking about the difference between open world games and linear games is that the likelihood of something going wrong is exponentially higher than in linear games. Players can move in any direction, they can consume content in any order, and to make all of this happen, you need a really stable environment where you can make changes and still know that editing won’t break the game in 1600 places.
Jason Slama, game director of the new The Witcher
The developers also noted that their attention was attracted last year by one of the demos a new engine that showed off a medieval village with a bulletin board – just like in The Witcher 3. Apparently, that’s when they realized that their franchise would look good on UE5.
There are no more details about the new The Witcher yet.