The Witcher 4 Will Be Bigger and Better Than The Witcher 3, CD Projekt RED Says

The Witcher 4 will be bigger and better than its predecessor, The Witcher 3, according to Charles Tremblay, vice president of technology at CD Projekt RED. In a recent interview, he shared insights about the game’s development and the studio’s ambitions for the upcoming title.

Speaking to Eurogamer, Tremblay said,

I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, but I think we’re working on some very exciting things, 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.

Moving to Unreal Engine

One of the most significant changes for The Witcher 4 is the decision to move away from CD Projekt RED’s proprietary REDengine to Unreal Engine, which is widely used in the industry. Tremblay addressed the reasons behind this move, noting that it wasn’t due to failures with the REDengine but rather the need for a more scalable solution as the studio tackles multiple major projects.

“The first thing I want to say again, to be sure, 100 percent clear, is that the whole team, myself included, are extremely proud of the engine we built for Cyberpunk,” Tremblay explained. “So it is not about, ‘This is so bad that we need to switch’ and, you know, ‘Kill me now’ – that is not true. That is not true, and this is not why the decision was made to switch.”

Instead, Tremblay explained, the decision was based on the need for a more flexible engine to handle multiple projects at once. “The way we built stuff in the past was very one-sided, like one project at a time. We pushed the limit – but also we saw that if we wanted to have multiple projects at the same time, building in parallel, sharing technology together, it is not easy.”

Full Development Underway

Tremblay’s comments come shortly after CD Projekt RED confirmed that The Witcher 4 has entered “full-scale production” – a term that marks the most intensive phase of the game’s development.

“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,” Tremblay added. “So the technology should not be a blocker for us, basically.”