REDengine
More info
- Owner
- CD Projekt
- Released
- 2011
- Type
- Game engine (in-house)
- Successor
- Unreal Engine 5
CD Projekt RED's in-house engine, built for the big open worlds of The Witcher 2 and 3 and Cyberpunk 2077.
The first Witcher in 2007 ran on BioWare's licensed Aurora engine, and the studio had no wish to depend on someone else's technology again. REDengine debuted with The Witcher 2 in 2011; version 3 powered the open world of The Witcher 3 in 2015 and version 4 the Night City of Cyberpunk 2077 in 2020, with ray tracing and dense city streaming.
Cyberpunk's troubled launch on the previous console generation showed just how expensive it is to maintain your own game engine. In 2022 CD Projekt announced that the next Witcher would be built in Unreal Engine 5 in partnership with Epic. Plenty of big studios have taken the same road, which goes some way to explaining why AAA games increasingly look alike.