Phantom Liberty will be Cyberpunk 2077’s first and last DLCwhen it launches on September 26, before CD Projekt Red shifts its focus to other projects including the nextWitchergame. According to SVP of business development Michał Nowakowski, this decision was made because the team is done with its in-house Red Engine.
“It’s a technological decision, to be honest,” Nowakowski said in a Q&A session (as reported byVGC). “This is the last time we’re working on the Red Engine for the time being at least, and in the foreseeable future as you know we are working on the Unreal Engine from Epic. This was one of the key reasons why we decided this was the only one.”
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The Red Engine was developed following the infamous cancelled ‘White Wolf’ console port of the first Witcher game. It was designed to make it easier to port The Witcher 2 and its sequel to PlayStation and Xbox. After all, White Wolf had nearly bankrupted the company due to a costly and lengthy development as well as demands from Atari to repay it for its part in funding the port, seeing as it never released. Over the years, new iterations took shape, such asCyberpunk 2077’s Red Engine 4 which now supports ray tracing. But after partnering with Epic Games,CDPR retired Red Engine in favour of Unreal.
“This is an exciting moment as we’re moving from Red Engine to Unreal Engine 5, beginning a multi-year strategic partnership with Epic Games,” CD Projekt Red announced in a blog post last March. “It covers not only licensing but technical development of Unreal Engine 5, as well as potential future versions of Unreal Engine, where relevant. We’ll closely collaborate with Epic Games' developers with the primary goal being to help tailor the engine for open-world experiences.”
Phantom Liberty’s release is imminent, which means that CDPR is placing more devs onto its next big release. According to CDPR CEO Adam Kiciński, “a big part” of Phantom Liberty’s team of 300 developers is being moved to work on the next mainline Witcher game,codenamed Polaris, once the DLC launches.
“At the end of July, the Phantom Liberty team working on the pre-release phase consisted of 300 people,” Kiciński said in an earnings call. “That’s fewer than at the end of 2022, but it still remains our biggest team. On the other hand, the Polaris team has grown to almost 260 developers at the end of July.”
We don’t know anything about this Witcher sequel, not even its name, but CDPR has said that it will kick off a “new saga” for the series.
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