Developers of Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3 explained abandoning proprietary REDengine in favor of Unreal Engine 5

Cyberpunk 2077 on REDengine pleasantly surprised players with its visuals, but ultimately CD Projekt RED decided to switch to the modern Unreal Engine 5. Far from all fans are thrilled about this.

The new games from CD Projekt RED are being developed on the modern Unreal Engine 5. Not all players are happy about this — some point out various technical issues associated with the Epic Games product.

Charles Tremblay, Vice President of Technology, explained why the developers of The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 decided to abandon their proprietary REDengine in favor of Unreal Engine 5.

He pointed to the ability to launch multiple projects simultaneously and other advantages:

“In the past, we were doing things very lopsided — one project at a time. We pushed boundaries, but we also saw that if we want to have multiple projects at the same time, develop in parallel, share tech, it’s not that easy”.

Another factor is that the CDPR specialist believes they can benefit from collaborating with Epic Games:

“We can help them [Epic Games] with their vision, open-world things, and they can help us on the tech side on some aspects that we’d like them to [do] and we don’t have to focus too much on — because at the end of the day, we’re a game company, right?

The idea was, we can push technology: all the tech people in the company can finally work together on different projects instead of being centralized on one tech that’s very hard to share between projects”.

We can share expertise, share people [move them between projects], share knowledge. Also, we wanted to make sure that we developed some of the tech right this time — with our expertise, we know how to do things, with all that expertise from the past, and now it’s time to make it shared with all the [developer] teams”.

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Cover art author: CD Projekt RED. Image source: steamcommunity.com