Future CD Projekt Red games will hopefully avoid the fate that befell Cyberpunk 2077 at launch thanks to changes in the studio’s development process, according to a company executive.
CDPR is working on a number of projects, including multiple games in The Witcher universe. It recently announced that Project Polaris — which many people are referring to as The Witcher 4, although that hasn’t been confirmed — had entered “full-scale production.” We don’t know much of anything about this new game, but it’ll use Unreal Engine 5 instead of the proprietary REDengine. Future projects will also utilize the Epic Games-owned engine.
Eurogamer published an extensive interview Friday with VP of technology Charles Tremblay, who explained that the switch will not only help CDPR work on multiple games at once but it’ll help to counter any of the issues the studio ran into while developing Cyberpunk 2077 while ensuring The Witcher 4 will be bigger than its predecessor, The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, one of the best games of all time.
“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,” Tremblay said.
The studio will also be expanding the pre-production process, has reduced its head count to counter bloat, and will ensure that games will work on console earlier in the pipeline instead of just targeting one platform. This does mean that games will likely take longer to develop, but the hope is that they’ll be in a better state.
“With the Witcher or you know, with Cyberpunk in the future, it’s only down to us. Everything can fail, but it’s our role to make sure it doesn’t,” Tremblay said. “And remembering and understanding that I think is the biggest reason for me to be optimistic, because in the company everyone’s constantly worried — but worried in a good way, if you know what I mean.”
While Cyberpunk 2077 has reportedly sold over 30 million copies since launch, according to an X post from this week, it launched in an incomplete state, with countless bugs and poor cross-generation console performance. It had so many problems that it was unplayable for many users. It has since gained back player goodwill thanks to the well-received Phantom Liberty DLC and a successful anime spinoff on Netflix, but CDPR had to evaluate how it developed games and make some changes.