CUTTING EDGE

The technological innovations bringing the world of CYBERPUNK 2077 to life.

- Jacob Ridley

Five years on and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt remains, in quiet defiance, at the top of our Steam libraries and perpetually ready to play—a testament to the ambition and sticktoitiveness of the studio that built it. But if you thought that meant CD Projekt Red stopped innovating for even a second, think again. The developer has been continuously adapting and building a new set of tools for what’s to come. When it launches this November, Cyberpunk 2077 is promising to deliver something even bigger, the culmination of years of work on an ever-evolving engine by a team that simply refuses to sit still. “The engine is like a living organism, almost like a cellular automata,” Krzysztof Krzyscin, technical art director, CD Projekt Red, says, “constantly evolving, mutating, and expanding from its initial set of branches.” The engine in question is CD Projekt Red’s proprietary REDengine, which made its first appearance with The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, and the cellular automata is in reference to mathematician John Conway’s Game of Life, a zero-player game that follows a collection of cells that evolve and adapt in response to a simple set of four rules, and thus do not require human interaction. What these two things share is their ability to continuously adapt—both the cellular automata and the REDengine are in a constant state of flux.

Unlike a cellular automata, however, the REDengine requires human effort, and lots of it. It’s what CD Projekt Red has been working on ever since The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, so that it may form the basis of its next game,