"We don't want to go back."
The Witcher 4 is finally in full production, as CD Projekt announced during its Q3 financial update. The game, which is still codenamed Project Polaris, moved into full-scale production several weeks ago, chief financial officer Piotr Nielubowicz said.
Speaking to Eurogamer, CD Projekt Red’s vice president of technology, Charles Tremblay, discussed the switch from the internally developed REDengine, last used on Cyberpunk 2077, to Unreal Engine 5. “I will not say it’s easy,” he said, “but I think that we have some cool stuff going, and hopefully that will have some good showcase [of the technology]. The only thing I will say is that changing the tech for us does not change the fact that we always will be ambitious”.
Tremblay went on to declare Project Polaris, which is currently being worked on by 400 members of CDPR’s 650-strong staff, would be bigger and better than anything the studio had done before. “And the next game we do will not be smaller, and it will not be worse. So it will be better, bigger, greater than The Witcher 3, it will be better than Cyberpunk—because for us, it’s unacceptable [to launch that way]. We don’t want to go back.”
Changing to a completely different engine can’t be easy, and Tremblay didn’t deny that there would be issues. “Even if there will be some ‘sweaty moments’ and maybe even some bad stuff happening,” he said, “still, I think that we will try everything we can to make it even more than what we achieved in the past years. So the technology should not be a blocker for us, basically.”
The next Witcher game doesn’t have a release date yet, and given the multiple delays of Cyberpunk 2077 it wouldn’t be surprising if the studio waited until it had really nailed down the schedule before announcing anything. We do know that Geralt voice actor Doug Cockle is returning, although Geralt won’t be the main character.
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