CDPR explained the abandonment of the REDEngine and revealed that The Witcher 4 developers were allowed to look into the "black box" of Unreal Engine

Specialists deeply immersed themselves in the modern engine.

Recently, CD Projekt RED co-CEO Michał Nowakowski gave an interview that was published by Edge Knowledge. During the conversation, the topic of switching to Unreal Engine was touched upon.

The developers presented high-quality graphics in Cyberpunk 2077 on REDengine and implemented various modern technologies in the game, so many players cannot understand why CD Projekt RED ultimately decided to abandon its own engine.

Nowakowski explained that the developers, in essence, had to create a new engine every time:

Many people don't understand that while REDengine had “numbered versions,” they weren't directly built on top of previous ones. In practice, because all these games were so different from each other, for each game we had to build a new engine almost from scratch, which was very time-consuming.

Nowakowski also said that the developers had the opportunity to thoroughly study Unreal Engine (the company closely cooperates with Epic Games). The decision to switch to a new engine was made after Epic showed CDPR the Matrix demo:

Epic allowed us to look inside the “black box” of Unreal Engine. I think we are currently the only company that can do this besides Epic itself — and also gave us the opportunity to “dig around” in it, so we are actually co-developing one of the biggest technologies on the market. The idea was that we wanted to tell more stories without worrying about the foundation of the engine itself. Epic provided us with this “framework,” and we can still develop it and maintain our uniqueness.