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Game News CD Projekt announce that the next Witcher game is in development using Unreal Engine 5

Infinitron

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Tags: CD Projekt

Today CD Projekt officially confirmed that a new Witcher title is in development. It'll be the first installment in a "new Witcher saga", which presumably means that it won't be about Geralt. After their Cyberpunk misadventure, it's no surprise that CD Projekt have decided to return to the franchise that put them on the map. However, they are dumping the REDengine in favor of Unreal Engine 5 as part of an extensive new partnership with Epic Games (which they were quick to assure does not mean that the game will be an Epic Games Store-exclusive). Here's the announcement:

CD PROJEKT RED today revealed that the next installment in The Witcher series of video games is currently in development with Unreal Engine 5, kicking off a new saga for the franchise and a new technology partnership with Epic Games.

Today’s announcement marks the first official confirmation of a new game in The Witcher series since the release of CD PROJEKT RED’s previous single-player, AAA RPG in the franchise — The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — which won a total of 250 Game of the Year awards and was later expanded upon with the Hearts of Stone and Blood & Wine add-ons.

The teaser image for the new game features a medallion, accompanied by the phrase A New Saga Begins. Beyond this initial confirmation of a new saga in The Witcher franchise, no further details — such as a development time frame or release date — were provided.

CD PROJEKT RED also announced that they will be moving to Unreal Engine 5 as part of the multi-year strategic partnership with Epic Games. Since The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, released in 2011, CD PROJEKT RED has used their proprietary REDengine technology to build their games. This new relationship with Epic covers not only licensing, but technical development of Unreal Engine 5, as well as potential future versions of Unreal Engine, where relevant. Developers from CD PROJEKT RED will collaborate with those from Epic with the primary goal being to help tailor the engine for open-world experiences, beginning with the development of the next game in The Witcher franchise.

Speaking on the use of Unreal Engine 5 for this, and future games, CTO of CD PROJEKT RED, Paweł Zawodny stated:

“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. From the outset, we did not consider a typical licensing arrangement; both we and Epic see this as a long-term, fulfilling tech partnership. It is vital for CD PROJEKT RED to have the technical direction of our next game decided from the earliest possible phase as; in the past, we spent a lot of resources and energy to evolve and adapt REDengine with every subsequent game release. This cooperation is so exciting, because it will elevate development predictability and efficiency, while simultaneously granting us access to cutting-edge game development tools. I can’t wait for the great games we’re going to create using Unreal Engine 5!”

Tim Sweeney, Founder and CEO of Epic Games, remarked about the partnership:

“Epic has been building Unreal Engine 5 to enable teams to create dynamic open worlds at an unprecedented scale and level of fidelity. We are deeply honored 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.”

Simultaneously with these announcements, CD PROJEKT RED also provided confirmation that REDengine, the technology which powers Cyberpunk 2077, is still being used for the development of the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 expansion.
I'm sure the game is still years away, but hey, let the drama begin.
 

Zed Duke of Banville

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If CDPR leadership had any sense, they would have started development on such an Elder Scrolls-like Witcher IV as soon as the trainwreck of Cyberpunk 2077 was made available to the public, intending to pre-empt The Elder Scrolls VI, which is still entirely possible. :M
In before the revelation that the reason for no DLC and slow progress in patching is that CDPR surreptitiously shifted most of their personnel to development of an Open World RPG in the Witcher setting that will release in 2024 well before Bethesda completes the Elder Scrolls VI. :M
Called it! +M

I wonder if CDPR really did start working on The Witcher IV right after the release of Cyberpunk 2077.
 

Zeriel

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Jesus the Epic thing REALLY makes it sound like CDPR is actually going into the shitter and have lost all their good employees. I thought it would be bad, but not this bad.
 

CRD

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Jesus the Epic thing REALLY makes it sound like CDPR is actually going into the shitter and have lost all their good employees. I thought it would be bad, but not this bad.
more like they finally understood they don't have the talent it needs to develop the engine they need for their vision of the games and after seeing they won't fix 2077 no matter what because technical limitations, choose the wise way of moving on to the industry standard that is way way ahead of them, and stop investing in something that doesn't have a future

It is also way easier to attract talent from the industry that already works with a known environment than people who don't know the tech you are working with, and convince them to come to your company and then lose 3 to 6 months learning an engine that you are the only user in the world and it won't help them in their future if they leave.

with UE, unity and some more, there is virtually no reason at all to maintain your own engine unless you are a titan like EA bethesda or ubi.
 

CRD

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I think the only company left with a shitty proprietary engine full of problems is from software.

I thought they were just using a version of Unreal that they carefully butchered in house?

nah, it was a fake rumor from 4chan, they are still using their own engine and they didn't even say anything about licensing UE for the future.

Japanese engineers are strange people, it's hard to make them move from shitty in-house devs to industry standards, it happens even to networking engineers of fighting games where they were straight up refusing to implement the free open source hands down best netcode ever for those games GGPO, and forcing for years their shitty delay code. Years going against the community wishes, and spending money on atrocious solutions to what already was in the market just because they were too proud

They usually end accepting the truth about how they can't compete on a technical level with 10 engineers vs a behemoth of 500 specialized solely in the engine or any other feature, but not without forcing the consumers to eat their shit for some years more after everyone already moved.
 
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gaussgunner

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Jesus the Epic thing REALLY makes it sound like CDPR is actually going into the shitter and have lost all their good employees. I thought it would be bad, but not this bad.

They never had their own engine, they just modded Bioware's. They even recycled sidequests from Jade Empire into Witcher 3. :lol:

Although CDPR is in steep decline, I only see incline in this particular announcement. They haven't made a game that runs decently at release since Witcher 1 or 2, their modded engine is a slow ass piece of shit, and UE is the best.
 

ADL

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Jesus the Epic thing REALLY makes it sound like CDPR is actually going into the shitter and have lost all their good employees. I thought it would be bad, but not this bad.
How is a partnership between CDPR and Epic using UE5 for their next game a bad thing? There's no mandate that if you partner with Epic that you have to use the EGS exclusively on PC. STALKER 2 already demonstrated that and CDPR has already stated that it won't be. If anything, this will allow them to focus on the games themselves instead of having to work in parallel with WIP technologies or wait until something on a developer's wishlist is complete before the work can start.
 

Zeriel

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Jesus the Epic thing REALLY makes it sound like CDPR is actually going into the shitter and have lost all their good employees. I thought it would be bad, but not this bad.
How is a partnership between CDPR and Epic using UE5 for their next game a bad thing? There's no mandate that if you partner with Epic that you have to use the EGS exclusively on PC. STALKER 2 already demonstrated that and CDPR has already stated that it won't be. If anything, this will allow them to focus on the games themselves instead of having to work in parallel with WIP technologies or wait until something on a developer's wishlist is complete before the work can start.

It says terrible things about their internal capabilities. In the marketing campaign for Witcher 3 they talked a lot about all the tech they had created, including face animation tools, for Red Engine. Switching to an entirely new engine may be worth it for a small studio that can't afford overhead and training people, but it's definitely not good news for a prestigious independent studio that spent actual decades building up its own tech and saw massive dividends from said tech, only to suddenly abandon it after a failed release.

Setting aside the checkered past of suddenly switching to new engines and having to recreate the capabilities you already had in a new engine (see Frostbite and Bioware, it's not a great comparison because Frostbite is much harder to use than UE, and UE is famed for its ease of use, but still), it just does not create confidence in the context of what has happened recently. I don't know how anyone could look at it and see positive things. Maybe say it'll be a wash, sure, but it's not good.
 

Drowed

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Honestly, giving up the garbage that was their previous engine is the best decision they could make. If you notice, their games basically does not have any quests or dynamic events within environments with NPCs - everything always happens in restricted environments and heavily scripted. If the cracks already appeared clearly in Witcher 3 (and I say this being a person who liked the game), it is not the least bit surprising what a collapse CP2077 was. I will be honest and say that I did not expect it to be as bad as it turned out to be, but it was clear that CDPR does not have the competence to implement basic systems that other open world games have offered for over 15 years.

It makes much more sense to get a ready-made engine that offers most of the tools out of the box, needing only some tweaks to function in a minimally acceptable way, than to insist on the catastrophe that must be the spaghetti code of their latest monstrosity. The only sad thing about this announcement is that we now know for sure that since their intention is to migrate to a new engine, it is certain that CP2077 will not get significant updates, they are washing their hands of the game. What we see there is what we got, no "No Man's Sky Redemption Arc" to see here.
 

Twiglard

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They usually end accepting the truth about how they can't compete on a technical level with 10 engineers vs a behemoth of 500 specialized solely in the engine or any other feature, but not without forcing the consumers to eat their shit for some years more after everyone already moved.

It's giant "engines" and treating game development as a glorified asset pipeline that led us into this mess in the first place. Less is more.
 

CRD

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They usually end accepting the truth about how they can't compete on a technical level with 10 engineers vs a behemoth of 500 specialized solely in the engine or any other feature, but not without forcing the consumers to eat their shit for some years more after everyone already moved.

It's giant "engines" and treating game development as a glorified asset pipeline that led us into this mess in the first place. Less is more.
I disagree, those engines have put the industry upside down in just 5/10 years allowing people to create just games, putting all the effort in the creativity and gameplay. Studios that gave us gems that were not possible at all before because the work needed just to build the most basic foundations were way over what a small team could do. Even games made by a single person.

Accessible and cheap engines like unity and unreal just changed all the industry where previously you needed to pay millions to publishers just to license their engine and forgot about the updates because they weren't included. Years and years with people using shitty quake engine mods with code that was there from 15 years ago.

Without those engines, the actual golden era of videogames would have never existed and you would still be playing the console-hit like gears of war or whatever shit you prefer from risk-adverse publishers that had the money to make games but not the balls to innovate or put resources in niche games, being niche anything that don't sell millions.

Unreal, unity, godot and some more have completely shaped the modern industry an consumers are grateful for it. You can even design and make videogames without coding a single line, if that's not great I don't know what it is. Games like hollow knight, return of the obra dinn, cuphead, death door, song of conquest, would have never happened without those engines
 
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It does make me think anons! It does!
CIWbvkH.gif
 

soulburner

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I think it's a good thing.

Part of the troubled CP2077 development was the simultaneous work on both the engine and the game. It caused a lot of problems, for example, imagine you're working on something for the game. The engine gets an update from the tech team. Your shit is no longer functioning properly, you have to stop further work, go back to what was just fine yesterday and find the cause. Sometimes you need to make a few small changes. Sometimes you have to start from scratch.

Additionally, if you'd apply for work at CDPR, you would spend the first few months not doing much creative and effective stuff, but learning how their tech works. On the other hand, the world is full of people who know Unreal inside and out. Even when CDPR will be using their internal tools for a lot of their own technology they will implement to Unreal, it's still Unreal and it will be much easier the get the hang of it.

It's fun and kind of elitist to have your own technology powering your own games, but being able to focus primarily on being creative is much better. Support from Epic and a much more stable base of Unreal should be very beneficial for the studio. Sure, if you're talented you can make an unstable, bad performing and buggy crap on any engine, so I hope CDPR sorts it out too... like, for example, by not setting unreal release dates ;)
 

Twiglard

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Without those engines, the actual golden era of videogames would have never existed and you would still be playing the console-hit like gears of war or whatever shit you prefer from risk-adverse publishers that had the money to make games but not the balls to innovate or put resources in niche games, being niche anything that don't sell millions.

Unreal, unity, godot and some more have completely shaped the modern industry an consumers are grateful for it. You can even design and make videogames without coding a single line, if that's not great I don't know what it is. Games like hoollow knight, return of the obra dinn, cuphead, death door, song of conquest,

That doesn't appear to be true. In the Codexian Top 101 RPG poll, the first game using an 'engine' is Pathfinder: Kingmaker as #14. The next one is Shadowrun: Dragonfall as position #28. Why so few and far between when 'engines' are supposedly essential? If anything, access to 'engines' and asset pipelines put too much pressure on game developers who know how to do their job, to be replaced with zoomer shit-for-brains using 'middleware' and designing levels by using somebody else's tools.

In programming, there's no better way to know how something works than implement it by yourself. You don't necessarily need to improve upon and use such prototype, but it's a necessary step. Too much attention has been focused onto getting things out of the door without knowing its internal representation.
 
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Van-d-all

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While using a 3rd party, proven engine will definitely take some strain from development, and make standardized asset creators readily available, close partnership with company as cancerous as Epic, in the long run, will become a crippling shot in the foot IMO. Will see.
 

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