Senior developer says that CD Projekt's switch from Cyberpunk 2077 to Unreal was not motivated by the game's poor launch or the fact that it was "so bad we needed to switch".

Charles Tremblay, CDPR's vice president of technology, explained the reasons behind the company's surprising move to Unreal Engine 5 over its own REDengine in an interview with Eurogamer. It has less to do than you think with Cyberpunk 2077’s difficult development and rough launch.

Tremblay told Eurogamer that "the whole team, including myself, are extremely proud" of the engine they built for Cyberpunk. "It's not about 'This is bad enough that we have to switch' or 'Kill Me Now'. That's not true. This is not true and it is not the reason for the switch.

Tremblay explained that the move wasn't a reaction to Cyberpunk’s buggy launch or poor reception at first, but rather a way to prepare CDPR for the simultaneous development of multiple titles. The studio is currently working on three games: The Witcher 4 codenamed Polaris, which has just begun full production, Orion, the next Cyberpunk title, and a new IP codenamed Hadar.

Tremblay explained that the way they built things in the past, was very one-sided. They would only work on one project at a given time. "We pushed it to the limit, but we also saw that if you wanted to build multiple projects at the same time in parallel and share technology, it was not easy.

"The idea was to push the technology and finally have all of the technical people working together on different project, rather than being super centralized in one technology that is very difficult to share between other projects."

It makes sense: A studio that builds its own engine has the freedom to customize it to its exact specifications and the familiarity of having built it from scratch. The studio will have to spend a lot of money on both the initial development as well as any maintenance and upgrades that may follow. Skyrim designer Bruce Nesmith made this point when discussing the conversation around Bethesda. There's no one to turn to if something goes wrong in the tech department.

Third-party engines free up developer resources by outsourcing maintenance to the engine's licensed provider (in this instance Epic), while also providing external customer support for major issues. The downsides are the potential one-size-fits-all nature of third party engines, the cost of switching over everything (also mentioned by Nesmith), as well as the fact that Epic will always put its own interests first when it comes to Unreal's direction.

Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic, has stated that he believes the Unreal Engine will be widely adopted as a way to create an interoperable Metaverse for all projects created using the toolset. The first wave of UE5 third-party games has had a mixed bag of technical issues, with inconsistent performance and a plague of persistent stuttering on PC.

Some of the most impressive games of this generation were built using proprietary engines--particularly Alan Wake 2, which I'd argue is one of the best looking and graphically impressive games around. Dragon Age: The Veilguard is BioWare's last game on EA/DICE Frostbite. It looks great and runs on a variety of hardware.

I am becoming increasingly concerned about the industry's trend to abandon in-house tools for Unreal Engine. The expertise and capacity that studios give up to make this change will be difficult to rebuild if the bets don't pay off. UE5's results have been mixed, and its future seems to be tied to a massive project to change the way games are created, sold, and played.

I also think it's a shame since so much of CDPR's legend was built around the audacious, generation-leapfrogging graphics made possible by the REDengine, the so-called "Slavic Magic" beloved by gaming meme makers and at least one notable developer. We'll know if this move was right once we get Polaris, Orion and Hadar. Tremblay told Eurogamer CDPR wants Polaris be a bigger, more ambitious, and better game than The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077. 400 of CDPR’s 650 employees are working on it.