CD Projekt Red has The Witcher 4 running on all target platforms after Cyberpunk 2077 lesson

CD Projekt Red has The Witcher 4 running on all target platforms after Cyberpunk 2077 lesson Game Developer spoke to CD Projekt Red co-CEO Michal Nowakowski. Cyberpunk 2077 was a lesson for CD Projekt Red. After its disastrous launch and subsequent removal from the PlayStation Store, developer CD Projekt Red now makes sure that its games are working on all platforms throughout development, co-CEO Michal Nowakowski told Game Developer. "You come to the studio, you launch Witcher 4 right now," Nowakowski said. "You can launch it on PC. You can launch it on PS5. You can launch it on Xbox Series X, and it's going to run." That's in contrast to how Cyberpunk 2077 worked its way through development—the whole thing was PC-driven, Nowakowski said. "The way the studio was thinking was that we are reaching for the best possible visuals," he said. "We want to push the boundaries of what is doable in terms of cinematic feeling and whatnot, and PC was just the best suited rig for that. There was this, as it turned out, false belief that toning it down to whatever was the current gen is not going to be that much of a challenge." Nowakowski said CD Projekt Red faced this sort of challenge with The Witcher 3, but "got a bit lucky here and there," which made the studio feel like Cyberpunk 2077 would end up fine, too. "Since then, we don't take chances," he said. "We want to be sure that it actually works." If something's wrong with The Witcher 4 on a single platform, the developer stops to fix everything until they're sure of the problem. It means the milestone process for the game is a little different. "For example, technically, we should hit, let's say, 10 checkmarks," he posited. "Back in the past, if we missed one or two, we were like, 'we're gonna catch up with that later on.' Sometimes we did, but sometimes we didn't, and then two milestones or three milestones down the road, you have like four or five missing checkmarks and it's not that easy." Speaking about the newly announced The Witcher 3 expansion and remaster, Nowakowski said CD Projekt Red is working with a company called Geeksoft, based in Hungary, because of their extensive knowledge of The Witcher 3's engine—Red Engine. Nowakowski said that the Red Engine used for Cyberpunk 2077 is not the same as it was when used for The Witcher 3, and revisiting that can be challenging. Geeksoft comes from the modding community, and have "been very active in the world of the Witcher," he said. The company hired them to help with The Witcher 3's modding tools release. It made sense for them to sign back on for CD Projekt Red's return to that world. Nowakowski didn't want to give much detail on the future for CD Projekt Red, but said the company will share more about the mysterious Project Hadar "at some point," perhaps, in the next five years. For now, it's back to the task at hand: The Witcher 3 and The Witcher 4.