CD Projekt Red has, for the better part of a decade, been at the forefront of technology in video games. While The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt always looked good, it was Cyberpunk 2077 that set a benchmark for in-game visuals in the industry, though it involved a lot of work from CDPR to upgrade its in-house REDengine. For its upcoming games, which include the next Witcher and Cyberpunk sequels, CDPR is switching to Unreal Engine, though that doesn't mean the studio is starting from scratch.

At Gamescom LATAM, GLHF got to talk to Paweł Sasko, associate game director at CDPR, about the switch. Most people assume that abandoning a legacy engine for a mainstream one means leaving behind old knowledge, though that's not the case with the Polish developer.

"Every time, we have almost started from scratch," says Sasko. "We transfer the knowledge of how the toolset works, what works when it comes to the structural build of the game - it's the institutional knowledge that is in the minds of your people. So all of those things could be moved from engine to engine to engine to engine."

CD Projekt Red has, for the better part of a decade, been at the forefront of technology in video games. While The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt always looked good, it was Cyberpunk 2077 that set a benchmark for in-game visuals in the industry, though it involved a lot of work from CDPR to upgrade its in-house REDengine. For its upcoming games, which include the next Witcher and Cyberpunk sequels, CDPR is switching to Unreal Engine, though that doesn't mean the studio is starting from scratch.

At Gamescom LATAM, GLHF got to talk to Paweł Sasko, associate game director at CDPR, about the switch. Most people assume that abandoning a legacy engine for a mainstream one means leaving behind old knowledge, though that's not the case with the Polish developer.

"Every time, we have almost started from scratch," says Sasko. "We transfer the knowledge of how the toolset works, what works when it comes to the structural build of the game - it's the institutional knowledge that is in the minds of your people. So all of those things could be moved from engine to engine to engine to engine."

Of course, UE5 is a popular engine, most of whose features are free to use for developers. For a company opening a new studio in America and hiring en masse, including developers from acclaimed RPGs, working on an engine that most developers are familiar with is a major boon.

"Some technology will move forward," said Sasko. "It's a matter of exactly what you can do. I cannot go into more detail because I will have to go into the design of our future games, which I cannot do."

It's the extra mile that CDPR goes that gives its games an edge over its competitors. Anyone who has played Cyberpunk 2077 can appreciate the painstaking detail in which the first-person perspective accurately follows V's movements. Those movements required CDPR to spend over a year filming reference footage with a GoPro camera.

"When you click a chair to sit, you never see [protagonist] V sit with the camera," adds Sasko. "You see the arm goes first, then you see the body, then the body goes from the arm, then you sit down - there's always body presence, as we call it."

CDPR is known for pushing visual boundaries by combining realism with stellar art direction, and making tons of custom assets helps achieve that. Of course, anyone who has used Unreal Engine knows about its robust marketplace, offering thousands of community-made assets, ready to be dropped into your project without additional work.

The team is well aware of it, often using those assets to visualize a scene before any artwork is done. Making games in Unreal Engine also means opening it up to the wider modding community, as it won't require as much work from CDPR to offer bespoke modding tools as it did for The Witcher 3.

There's another advantage associated with UE5, which involves transmedia collaboration. With a Cyberpunk live-action project in production, creating assets in Unreal Engine makes them useful for both video games and virtual filmmaking.

CDPR has not commented on the specifics of the upcoming project, though it only takes an educated guess to deduce how the developer will look to streamline its production. After all, it was the strong collaboration between CDPR's team and Studio Trigger that made Cyberpunk Edgerunners one of the best anime series of recent years.