Following the news that The Witcher 4 has officially entered full-scale production, Eurogamer has published an article featuring quotes from CD Projekt RED developers on the project.
Joint CEO Michał Nowakowski claimed the game will be bigger and better than previous titles made by the Polish studio because that’s simply how they roll in terms of ambition.
Again, I will not say it’s easy, 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. 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. Even if there will be some ‘sweaty moments’ and maybe even some bad stuff happening, 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.
Speaking of the technology, the article also includes a quote from VP of Technology Charles Tremblay regarding the somewhat puzzling decision to switch from the RED Engine to Epic’s Unreal Engine 5, starting with The Witcher 4. Tremblay first said that CD Projekt RED is very proud of its achievements with the RED Engine, including Cyberpunk 2077. However, the studio noticed it was problematic to handle multiple projects at once, whereas it should be simpler with UE5. Moreover, using the most popular game-making tool, CDPR could put more players working on the actual games.
So the idea was that we can push the technology, we can finally have all the technical people in the company working together on different projects, rather than super centralised into one technology that can very difficultly be shared between other projects.
We can share expertise, share people, share knowledge. And also we wanted to be sure that we developed some of the technology correctly this time around – with our expertise, we know how to do things with the experience we had in the past, and now it’s time to actually make it shareable across all the groups.
Another key aspect is that for The Witcher 4 and the subsequent future games, CDPR understandably wants to avoid a repeat of the Cyberpunk 2077 situation on consoles. For this reason, they are now making sure all versions of the game run equally well during all stages of development.
Having the console working super late, it’s unacceptable anymore, and it’s part of our process. So we do the reviews on console, so we know exactly where we are on all the platforms – the lower platforms we have – rather than, you know, ‘Oh PC is fine, so we can go forward’. So we changed this approach to have a broader visibility on the other platforms we want to have.
Tremblay also hinted that there likely won’t be a PC-only launch, even though that might have helped optimization by focusing on a single platform at a time.
Lastly, Joint CEO Michał Nowakowski discussed the marketing plan for The Witcher 4. The studio doesn’t want a long marketing phase like with Cyberpunk 2077, so the goal is to start roughly a year before launch rather than two years. That said, Nowakowski also added that doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be teases or anything like that before the start of the full-scale marketing campaign. This leaves fans with a bit of hope to see something of the studio’s next game sometime next year.
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