CD Projekt Red has been at the forefront of video game technology for the better part of a decade. While The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt always looked good, it was Cyberpunk 2077 that set the benchmark for game visuals in the industry, even though CDPR required a lot of work to upgrade its own REDengine. For its upcoming games, which include more Witcher and Cyberpunk sequels, CDPR is switching to the Unreal Engine, though that doesn’t mean the studio is starting from scratch.

At Gamescom LATAM, GLHF spoke with Paweł Sask, Deputy Game Director of CDPR, about the change. Most people assume that abandoning an older engine for a mainstream one means abandoning old knowledge, although this is not the case for the Polish developer.

“We started almost from scratch every time,” says Sasko. “We transfer the knowledge of how the toolkit works, what works in terms of the structural build of the game — it’s the institutional knowledge that’s in the minds of your people. So all of those things can be moved from engine to engine to engine to engine.”

CD Projekt Red has been at the forefront of video game technology for the better part of a decade. While The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt always looked good, it was Cyberpunk 2077 that set the benchmark for game visuals in the industry, even though CDPR required a lot of work to upgrade its own REDengine. For its upcoming games, which include more Witcher and Cyberpunk sequels, CDPR is switching to the Unreal Engine, though that doesn’t mean the studio is starting from scratch.

At Gamescom LATAM, GLHF spoke with Paweł Sask, Deputy Game Director of CDPR, about the change. Most people assume that abandoning an older engine for a mainstream one means abandoning old knowledge, although this is not the case for the Polish developer.

“We started almost from scratch every time,” says Sasko. “We transfer the knowledge of how the toolkit works, what works in terms of the structural build of the game — it’s the institutional knowledge that’s in the minds of your people. So all of those things can be moved from engine to engine engine to engine.”

UE5 is of course a popular engine, most of its features are free for developers to use. For a company opening a new studio in America and hiring developers in droves, including developers from established RPGs, working on an engine that most developers are familiar with is a huge asset.

“Some technology will move forward,” Sasko said. “It’s a question of what exactly you can do. I can’t go into details because I’ll have to go into the design of our future games, which I can’t.”

It’s the extra mile that CDPR goes that gives its games an edge over its competitors. Anyone who has played Cyberpunk 2077 can appreciate the meticulous detail in which the first-person perspective accurately follows V’s movements. These movements required CDPR to spend over a year shooting reference footage with a GoPro camera.

“When you click the chair to sit down, you never see [protagonist] Sit down with the camera,” adds Sasko. “You see the arm go first, then you see the body, then the body comes out of the arm, then you sit down – there’s always the presence of the body, as we call it.”

CDPR is known for pushing visual boundaries by combining realism with stellar art direction, and creating a ton of their own assets helps achieve that. Of course, anyone who’s used Unreal Engine knows about its robust marketplace, which offers thousands of community-created assets ready to plug into your project without any extra work.

The team is well aware of this and often uses these means to visualize the scene before any artwork is finished. Making games in Unreal Engine also means opening up to a wider modding community, as it won’t require as much work from CDPR to offer custom modding tools as it did with The Witcher 3.

There is another benefit associated with UE5 that includes transmedia collaboration. The Cyberpunk live-action production project makes asset creation in Unreal Engine useful for both video games and virtual movie creation.
CDPR did not comment on the specifics of the upcoming project, though it only takes an educated guess to deduce what the developer will look like to streamline its production. After all, it was the strong collaboration between the CDPR team and Studio Trigger that made Cyberpunk Edgerunners one of the best anime series of recent years.