The Witcher Developer Talks New Game's Biggest Change And "Extraordinary" Open World

CD Projekt RED has shed some more light on its in-development sequel to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, explaining why the studio has made the jump from its proprietary REDengine to Unreal Engine 5.

The Polish developer took us all by surprise last month when it confirmed, rather out of the blue, that it's developing a "new saga" in The Witcher series. The upcoming game is being developed in Unreal Engine 5, and is not called The Witcher 4. That's pretty much all we know for sure right now.

Take a look at why Ciri should be the star of the new Witcher game below!

During the recent State of Unreal stream, CDPR's CTO Paweł Zawodny explained the thinking behind the change in engine for the new game. "It was the shift towards open world support that brought Unreal Engine 5 to our attention," he said.

"This opens a new chapter for us where we really want to see how our experience in building open-world games gets combined with all the engineering power of Epic," Zawodny continued. He added that CDPR and Epic will work together to "achieve something extraordinary in the end."

CDPR art director Jakub Knapik also commented on the fact that Unreal Engine 5 is already quite feature-rich, thanks to the contributions of other developers.

"The fact that Unreal is used by a lot of teams already in the world, a lot of perspectives are projected into the design of the tools and that helps the tool to be way more agile," he said.

The upcoming game's director, Jason Slama, also stressed the importance of having a reliable and stable engine - especially when building an open-world game.

"One of the things that is really important to keep in mind when talking about open-world games versus, let’s say, linear games is the possibilities of the things that can go wrong or the scenarios that you have to consider are exponentially higher than linear games," he explained.

"Players can go in whatever direction they want, they can handle content in any order that they want theoretically, and to really encapsulate that means that you need a really stable environment where you can be able to make changes with a high level of confidence that it’s not going to break in 1,600 other places down the line."

There's no word on a release window for the new Witcher game yet, but I wouldn't expect it for a long while.