Cyberpunk 2077 served as an unforgettable lesson for CD Projekt Red. According to co-CEO Michał Nowakowski in an interview with Game Developer, following the disastrous launch and subsequent removal from the PlayStation Store, CDPR now ensures throughout the development process that their games function properly on all platforms.
"You can walk into the studio right now and immediately run The Witcher 4," Nowakowski said. "You can run it on PC. You can run it on PS5. You can run it on Xbox Series X, and it works properly." He noted that this stands in stark contrast to the development of Cyberpunk 2077, where the entire development process was PC-oriented.
"The studio's principle is to achieve the best possible visual fidelity," he added. "We wanted to push the boundaries of what's possible in terms of cinematic presentation, and PC was the most suitable configuration for achieving that goal. It turned out there was a mistaken belief at the time that porting the game to current-generation consoles wouldn't be too difficult." Nowakowski recalled that CDPR faced similar difficulties during the development of The Witcher 3, but got "a bit lucky," which led the studio to believe Cyberpunk 2077 would also go smoothly—but that wasn't the case. "Since then, we've stopped taking risks," he said. "We want to ensure Everythinggj truly works as intended."
If The Witcher 4 encounters issues on a particular platform, the developers will halt progress to fix Everythinggj until they are confident the problems are resolved. This means the way the game reaches various development milestones will differ. "For example, technically speaking, we should hit, say, 10 milestones," he explained. "In the past, if we missed one or two, we'd say, 'We'll catch up later.' Sometimes we did, sometimes we didn't, and after two or three more milestones, you'd already have four or five missing ones, making it much harder to resolve."
Discussing the recently announced The Witcher 3 expansion and remaster, Nowakowski stated that CD Projekt Red is collaborating with the Hungarian company Geeksoft, which has an in-depth understanding of Red Engine, the engine used by The Witcher 3. Nowakowski pointed out that the version of Red Engine used in Cyberpunk 2077 differs from the one used in The Witcher 3, and reverting to the older version could be quite challenging.