For four years the move by CD Projekt Red to Unreal Engine 5 has had one popular explanation: the studio got burned by the Cyberpunk 2077 launch and threw its own engine away. Michał Nowakowski, one of the studio's two CEOs, says on the Deconstructor of Fun podcast that this is not what happened, and explains what actually settled it.
REDengine was not the problem
Nowakowski was asked directly whether Cyberpunk's troubled launch was the main reason for the engine switch. The answer was "yes and no".
A lot of people think like this, but this is a bit of a false assumption, I would say, because the issue with Cyberpunk was not really REDengine itself.
From there he lays out the company's logic: building technology was never the goal, stories were. REDengine carried The Witcher 2, The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, but nobody intended to hold on to it out of principle.
The dream of the company was actually never to make technology. It was to, yes, create visually and technically cutting-edge games, but most importantly telling the stories in the most convincing and immersive way.
The Matrix demo settled it
The turning point, by his account, was an early look at The Matrix Awakens, Epic's Unreal Engine 5 tech demo.
It was not the Cyberpunk launch that convinced us to abandon the REDengine and switch completely to Unreal Engine 5 with the future projects. It was more the moment we got an early scoop of the Matrix demo that Epic made.
The studio then asked itself whether UE5 could ship a game of their size, and answered honestly: not as it stood, not at the entry level. But with a relationship with Epic and work on the specific things their games need, it could. That is where the strategic collaboration announced in March 2022 came from.
What it gives The Witcher 4
The fan worry is easy to understand: somebody else's engine means less control and a game that looks like every other UE5 title. Nowakowski answers that by pointing at how deep the studio sits inside the engine alongside Epic.
We're actually, I think, the only team in the world outside of Epic that deals with the inside of the black box that the engine is.
Only the finished game can prove that, and FramesGames stays cautious here: other studios have promised deep engine surgery too, and what shipped was still recognisable Unreal with all its habits, shader compilation stutter included. On the other hand, CD Projekt Red has something to back it up, since the remake of the first Witcher is being built on the same engine.
While The Witcher 4 is in development, the nearest event for the series is the remaster of the third game. What is known about it and what owners of the old version should expect is collected in a separate FramesGames breakdown.
Sources
Every Michał Nowakowski quote comes from the Deconstructor of Fun podcast episode, the video on the podcast's own channel, and the transcript in Video Games Chronicle of 18 September 2026.
Timeline: the March 2022 announcement that the next Witcher game moves to Unreal Engine 5 and the announcement later that year that the first game's remake uses the same engine, both from CD Projekt's official statements. Games built on REDengine: The Witcher 2 (2011), The Witcher 3 (2015), Cyberpunk 2077 (2020). Images: the CD Projekt Red press centre.
