CD Projekt RED is transitioning to the modern Unreal Engine 5, with Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty being the final project on their proprietary REDengine. For some, this decision raises concerns about the developers and future projects.
Cyberpunk 2077’s game director attempted to dispel those fears:
“It’s not starting from scratch. Oftentimes, when you build things like Ray Reconstruction, there are plenty of solutions that can be applied to new engines. And if you look at what Unreal does well and what REDengine does well — there are some similarities and some differences, but brilliant engineers say: "Given everything that we know you crazy creatives want to do in the future, there’s less of a delta [difference] here. Let’s strategically move to [Unreal Engine 5]”.
CD Projekt RED has partnered with Epic Games, meaning they aren’t simply using the UE5 engine, but working collaboratively. The result will be something akin to CDPR’s own version of UE5, leveraging their experience with their proprietary engine: “…there are some things REDengine does better than Unreal, and we’re working with Epic to bring those into that engine as well. So it goes both ways...”.
The next The Witcher game is expected to be CD Projekt RED’s first title built on Unreal Engine 5.