CD Projekt has confirmed that a new Witcher game is in development, "kicking off a new saga for the franchise."
The new game will be built using Unreal Engine 5 rather than CD Projekt's REDengine, which the studio said will begin "a multi-year strategic partnership with Epic Games."
"It covers not only licensing, but technical development of Unreal Engine 5, as well as potential future versions of Unreal Engine, where relevant," CD Projekt said. "We'll closely collaborate with Epic Games’ developers with the primary goal being to help tailor the engine for open-world experiences."
CD Projekt said that the change to the new engine was made to help streamline the development process. "From the outset, we did not consider a typical licensing arrangement; both we and Epic see this as a long-term, fulfilling tech partnership," CD Projekt Red CTO Paweł Zawodny said. "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!"
The studio also confirmed that despite the shift to a new engine, the new Witcher game is not planned as an Epic Games Store exclusive.
https://www.pcgamer.com/witcher-4-announced/
Don't fuck this up please don't fuck this up
I think the Unreal Engine stuff is a big deal. It's pretty weird to me how many game studios have their own game engines that they use for a single game and then have to overhaul. More game studios using a shared game engine is probably a good thing. Most of the software industry already shares a ton of code. Like it says, the "partnership" will probably make Unreal better at open world game creation.
I'm not a coder but surely there'd be some downsides to the homogenization of Middleware and engines, right? If for no other reason than it helps give Epic even more of a monopoly/oligopoly?
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Definitely. It's just weird that so much effort is spent reimplementing the same systems over and over again. It can lead to a lot of cool and unique things if done by competent people who care, but it usually leads to making the same basic mistakes over and over again. A sort of capitalist waste that doesn't always produce much "innovation". In an ideal society I think people would mostly contribute to big shared projects to make them better, with some smaller projects that try alternative approaches.
It will be a bit different for me playing a CDProket game without the RED engine. Im so used to the engine from the WItcher games. Hopefully it results in a good game, Cyberpunk left a very bad taste in my mouth.