Cyberpunk 2077 is the last game to be powered by CD Projekt Red’s REDengine. The studio has been using its in-house game engine since 2011’s The Witcher 2 and added to the REDengine’s capabilities with each new game.
CD Projekt Red revealed last year that it is moving to the Unreal Engine 5 with its upcoming projects.
The studio has several games lined up including a sequel to Cyberpunk 2077 along with The Witcher 4 and a Witcher spin-off, all of which will use the game engine developed by Epic Games.
In an interview with PC Gamer, Cyberpunk 2077 director Gabe Amatangelo talked about the transition to Epic’s game engine in light of the studio’s recent release of Phantom Liberty. Amatangelo revealed that the shift to Unreal Engine 5 doesn’t mean that the studio is starting again from nothing.
“It isn’t starting from scratch,” Amatangelo explained. “A lot of times when you build these things, like Ray Reconstruction, there are a lot of methodologies you can apply to new engines. Learnings and the strategy of setting up the architecture. And when you look at the things that Unreal does well, the things that REDengine does well—there are some similarities and some gaps, but the brilliant engineers are like ‘with all the stuff that we know you crazy creatives want to do in the future, there’s less of a delta here. Let’s strategically shift to [Unreal Engine 5]’.”
Amatangelo was asked what were the challenges that the development team faced while using the REDengine that would be easier using Unreal. The director didn’t want to reveal details for the upcoming Cyberpunk sequel but said that it was “refreshing” to be using Unreal Engine 5 given what the studio has learned with 2077.
“Likewise there’s some things that REDengine does better than Unreal [that] we’re working with Epic to basically bring to that engine as well,” Amatangelo shared. “So it goes both ways… It’s about economies of scale: you can obviously do all these amazing things in both. There’s so much nuance behind it, but it comes down to ways to approach things to be able to do more. Not necessarily better—it could be just as good—but do it more. It’s a scale thing sometimes.”
Much of the Cyberpunk 2077 team is moving to The Witcher 4 with the release of Phantom Liberty. The next Witcher title will likely be the first game from the studio powered by Unreal Engine 5. The Cyberpunk sequel may be the next big project from CD Projekt Red after The Witcher 4.
