CD Projekt Red has confirmed that the next game under The Witcher series is currently in development. “A new saga begins”, says the teaser image.
The announcement also revealed that this new Witcher game will be developed using Unreal Engine 5 as part of a “multi-year strategic partnership”.
The Polish developers previously utilised their own internal game engine, REDengine for the development of all its games starting with The Witcher 2, and this includes its most recent title Cyberpunk 2077.
This move to Unreal Engine 5 isn’t just a standard licensing deal either, as it includes a technical partnership in which developers from CDPR and Epic Games can collaborate, with the goal to help the Unreal Engine be suited for open-world games. As such, the deal can extend to future Unreal Engine versions.
“One of the core aspects of our internal RED 2.0 Transformation is a much stronger focus on technology, and our cooperation with Epic Games is based on this principle,” said Paweł Zawodny, CTO at CD Projekt Red. “From the outset, we did not consider a typical licensing arrangement; both we and Epic see this as a long-term, fulfilling tech partnership.”
“Epic has been building Unreal Engine 5 to enable teams to create dynamic open worlds at an unprecedented scale and level of fidelity,” said Tim Sweeney, Founder and CEO, Epic Games.
“We are deeply honoured by the opportunity to partner with CD Projekt Red to push the limits of interactive storytelling and gameplay together, and this effort will benefit the developer community for years to come.”
The Witcher’s Twitter account also tweeted that “we are not planning on making the game exclusive to one storefront”, in response to a question if this deal also includes the game being an Epic Games Store exclusive on PC.
Cyberpunk 2077 experienced a very rough launch, especially on consoles, due to technical issues. So seeing the next Witcher starting fresh with a well-known and reliable game engine (plus direct access to the technical people responsible for said game engine) would hopefully be the change the devs need to avoid another mishap like Cyberpunk had at launch.
Cyberpunk has since got a major 1.5 update, which adds a proper next-gen console version as well as a slew of fixes and additions.
CD Projekt Red is now structured to have two internal teams. Another team is still working on Cyberpunk 2077, which is getting an expansion. That game will continue to be utilising REDengine.