Recently, I bit the bullet and got back into PC gaming. After spending over £1,000 on a custom-built RTX 40 rig, I was excited to see what next-gen is truly capable of, experiencing triple-A flagships at their best with maximum visuals and performance. As it turns out, next-gen is mostly capable of stuttering and crashes, with a DLSS band-aid slapped on top.
Oblivion Remastered should’ve been a thrilling return to Cyrodiil, but mostly it was infinite loading screens and unbearable lag; Avowed often struggled to maintain even a steady 30fps at higher settings; Silent Hill 2 Remake felt like it was hurling the innards of my PC into the Otherworld; and Stalker 2 was so irradiated (read: poorly optimised) that it practically burned a hole in the side of my computer.
What do they all have in common? Unreal Engine 5. It gets a bad rap with gamers, and I can’t say I blame them. So, when CD Projekt Red revealed that The Witcher 4 would be running on UE5, instead of its in-house engine, alarm bells started ringing.
You Should Be Worried That The Witcher 4 Is Using Unreal Engine 5
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times? Okay, maybe I should stop buying Unreal Engine 5 games.
Look no further than the latest disaster, Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, which launched to an “Overwhelmingly Negative” review score on Steam as players labelled it just another “stutter fest” — the UE5 motto. Time and time again, UE5 games prove themselves to be held together with duct tape and a dream, and when it all inevitably falls apart, players are left outraged and cheated. Yet time and time again, studios adopt the engine and walk headfirst into disaster. It’s hard to imagine The Witcher 4 faring any better.
Sure, CDPR is in a unique position, working closely with Unreal Engine 5 creator Epic Games to avert another buggy launch and improve the toolkit for other devs, but even Fortnite isn’t stable, with choppy performance, stuttering, and long load times. If the creator of UE5 can’t get it right, why do we think anyone else can?
What’s especially concerning is that none of the footage we’ve seen so far is of the game itself, but instead of linear, focused tech demos. They seem to run smoothly on top-of-the-line rigs, and look gorgeous, with some impressive reactivity and detailing, but it’s hardly representative of the final product.
Engineering and production manager Jan Hermanowicz even stressed that the game won’t look like the trailers, so we have no idea what it will run like when Ciri is thrust into an enormous, far more demanding open world, and the little info we do have doesn’t paint a pretty picture.
Warhorse Studios (Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2) co-founder Daniel Vávra recently slammed UE5, outright claiming that it’s incapable of handling vast RPGs like The Witcher. He even alleged that several devs at CD Projekt Red told him in 2024 that the open world still wasn’t working. It’s a huge hurdle for any studio to overcome, but with launch creeping closer, I’m not convinced CDPR will miraculously stick the landing.
UE5 games are constantly mired in performance issues, and expecting The Witcher 4 to break the curse is like lining up to spend the night with a striga.
We should know better, we should be sceptical, and we shouldn’t take everything we’re told at face value. We don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes, and all the evidence and history point to this being a huge mistake that will only leave PC players in the lurch. I hope I’m wrong, but after being burned so many times, I’d rather be surprised than disappointed.