CD Projekt Red Announces REDengine 3; Future of Key Franchises Look Bright

CD Projekt Red, the creators of The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077, have officially announced the tech that will be driving their next efforts. CD Projekt kept the technology in-house with REDengine3 and has created an engine that will allow them to advance their storytelling and world design in ways that we have yet to see from the studio. You read that right, CD Projekt Red is looking to step into open world game design while maintaining and even advancing their signature storytelling abilities. Today's press release had the following to say about the engine:

The REDengine 3 tech is tailor-made to create nonlinear and story-driven RPGs with  a system that allows to stream and handle fully explorable open-worlds. Cyberpunk 2077, the second project the studio is working on, will have prime examples demonstrating that REDengine 3 is the perfect tool for creating immense universes filled with exciting, nonlinear adventures. The advanced technology of the REDengine 3 makes RPGs comparable to top-shelf shooters, both in terms of game world presentation and the epic proportions of events that the player is drawn into. The engine is a next-gen ready solution that begins to blur the line between pre-rendered CGI movies and real time rendered graphics, bringing us closer to the most life-like world ever created in video games. All the state-of-the-art visuals form a living ecosystem allowing the player to be a part of a vivid environment. The new face and body animation systems implemented in REDengine 3 offer realistic expression of emotions, movie quality scenes and character interactions.

Our very own Mike Pittman made a comment last night about rumors that The Witcher 3 would be an open-world game so I was plenty excited to see the announcement in my inbox this morning. The Witcher franchise was a beautiful and technically sound game but I always wished it wasn't limited by the constraints of linear game design. With the announcement of The Witcher 3 looming on the horizon, that reality may soon become a reality. 

This announcement arrives just in time to infer some pretty exciting information regarding CD Projekt Red's other project, Cyberpunk 2077. We already know the game is a sci-fi RPG set in a gritty futurescape but now it seems like the game may add open-world to it's feature list. My only concern now is that the engine may once again plant CD Projekt Red back in the PC-only development scene. If the engine isn't optimized for console hardware, it may be awhile before we see either of these titles on the Xbox or Playstation. With that said, I can only imagine that they have a plan in place to ensure the engine runs on consoles (or next-gen hardware?) considering all the efforts they made to ensure The Witcher 2 was optimized for its debut on the Xbox 360 last year.

What are your thoughts or predictions?