CD Projekt Red on 10 years of the Witcher 3 and how it will inform Ciri's upcoming sequel adventure

We sit down with CD Projekt Red’s Senior VP of Technology, Charles Tremblay, to talk about all things past, present, and future on The Witcher 3’s 10th anniversary.

For many players there exists two moments in history: a time before the release of The Witcher 3 and the time after. A lot may have changed in the industry since 2015, but something that’s remained a constant is how revered CD Projekt Red’s open-world rendition of the celebrated Polish book series remains. 2025 marks a decade since its initial release on PS4, Xbox One, and PC, and in that time it’d be fair to say that a lot of other open-world games have been playing catch up.

Sure, we had The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim beforehand, but The Witcher 3 more than earns its place alongside Bethesda’s game as a true classic of the fantasy RPG genre. Knowing this makes it easy to understand why CD Projekt Red’s next game, The Witcher 4, is so highly anticipated.

The sequel is still without its release date, but we know that it will include a new region to explore – Kovir – alongside a totally new protagonist to do it with in Ciri. To find out more about how much CD Projekt Red as a studio has evolved since the Witcher 3's release, the switch to Unreal Engine 5, and how these changes may inform Ciri’s adventure, we flew to the studio’s HQ in Poland and spoke to Senior VP of Technology Charles Tremblay.

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How has CD Projekt Red’s approach to making games changed since The Witcher 3 first released?

I think The Witcher 3 was quite a sweet spot in terms of team size, mostly because we were quite a smaller team when I joined. We were 150-ish people, and we grew to 200 to 250 to make the whole [game]. The communication was fine. I could just walk to anyone at a walking distance. Right now, if I want to walk to the Witcher 4 team, I have to walk a few kilometres to the other building. The art team [and] the programming team were much more aligned also. We still had problems, but we were able to make the game as we used to do in the industry for decades.

When we scaled up to Cyberpunk 2077, we almost doubled the team. Now it's getting a bit scarier because the more people you have, the more the communication problems start to arise where there's expectation on one side and reality on the other. Before we very quickly could align. Now, there's so many people in the loop.

We tried to learn how to adapt, but it was extremely challenging and we did fail in quite a few ways. Some expectations from art were not aligned with engineering, especially [with] what we could do with the hardware we had at the time. But the ambition was there. If we had a small team, it would have probably been simpler and we didn’t think too much about this problem until it was too late.

Fast forward [to] where we are now. Especially after the launch of Cyberpunk, we had some self-introspection about, ‘okay, we do not see a way we can scale down back to 150 people because of the reality of the ambition, plus what people expect from our product’. We needed to change the way we approach game development a little bit. We don't think it's sustainable to grow to thousands of people to make a game. We want to keep around the ballpark of Cyberpunk’s scale, if not less.

We try to now have a more multidisciplinary team working together. I cannot say too much about Witcher 4, but I think that we are getting to a point where we get some good results. But still, we are learning and evolving how to make the game better and faster, and better for the players.

Is it hard to switch back to making and designing a fantasy world versus something more modern like Night City?

Oh, on the technology side, it’s completely different. One is a sprawling city with verticality. It was not a city like New York; it's much more organic. A very disgusting world [with] lots of trash and lots of details that needed to be handled. You have vehicles, which we don't necessarily have in The Witcher universe. Bigger crowd, different behaviours, encounters… graffiti everywhere.

When we go back to The Witcher, though, it is a much more dynamic world, mostly because of the forest. The forest is a completely different challenge, technically, to make it as good as possible.

You can imagine we will definitely have some city in some form going forward, like Novigrad that we had in The Witcher 3, so they're still there in some form. But I think one of the biggest issues we have right now is how to design forest and how to make everything move all the time. How to [give] it [a] feeling that it's alive. How do we improve from the Witcher 3 forest? How do make monsters, wildlife and everything so it fits into this universe’s completely different design?

Also, the agenda is quite different. The Witcher, of course, Ciri or Geralt, they are full-fledged characters. They have their own personality. There are things that they will not do. While when you go [back] to Cyberpunk, V is a more a mercenary. She has more freedom about how she wants to tackle the world, in an evil or good way. It's very difficult to see Geralt starting to go GTA style, so there's a different constraint.

The most recent glimpse of Witcher 4 we saw from the State of Unreal presentation. Were you happy to people’s reaction to that gameplay slice?

Oh definitely, I think that even our friends from PR were not expecting that it would be as well received, because it's very difficult to explain a tech demo, right? How do we discuss this with you guys? I think it turned out very well. There was a lot of things that we needed to prove within [the] technology and we aligned into what we showcased. And with Epic, it was much easier to now have a result on the screen. We want to go at 60fps on PS5.

Now the reception, when we were in Orlando and we were doing the rehearsal, I had shivers. I had complete shivers the first time I saw it from the beginning to end, and I was like, ‘this is just fantastic’. Of course, we saw it on the little screen and were iterating on it, but when we saw on the big screen we were like, ‘okay, this is going to be great’. And I think when we did the first official rehearsal everybody from Epic and our side were very impressed about the result.

Speaking of Epic, how are you finding the process of developing Witcher 4 in Unreal Engine 5 as opposed to the Red Engine from before?

We are a very ambitious company and now, since we work together [with Epic] on what it means to make the next generation of open-world, we need to align differently. That’s why we did this. The two technologies are completely different, the way they handle a few things. Definitely some things would have been way easier on RED Engine and somethings are way easier on Unreal.

Now we just try to take all the good things we have on Unreal and all the things we add with Unreal Engine, and try to now have some kind of a beautiful baby, just to be sure that we can scale up to the hardware.

We don't want to go back and to have a less quality product. For us, it's not very acceptable to step back, right? The ambition is still there. We want to push forward always. This was very important for us, and I think this is why with Epic, we managed to have very good collaboration. I think the fact that they managed to work with us to make this open world and deliver the technology that is required to make it at performance [where] everybody will benefit, not just us.

Finally, with it being The Witcher 3’s 10th anniversary, do you have a favourite quest?

I think the most interesting one is probably when you reunite with the witchers in Kaer Morhen. All those characters have been following you around since starting your journey with Geralt. It was really great to continue building into those great characters. All the quests with those characters were great.

I'm a sucker for a nostalgic moment, especially when you're an IP fan or a game fan and you have all those moments that you know those characters, you've been working with them, or having discussions with them in previous games. There is, of course, all the quests that go back to The Witcher 2, Letho, which if you didn’t kill him, spoilers, I think it's great to have him back and having this character back, and the dialogue was just fantastic.