CD Projekt Red is implementing a strict documentation process for the development of "The Witcher 4" and "Cyberpunk 2" to prevent massive data loss and operational chaos like in previous projects.
Internal development notes, tool instructions, and design concepts must now be updated at every milestone, as reaching the next development phase will be blocked without complete documentation.
CD Projekt is drawing conclusions for the future.
The Polish development studio is thus drawing the consequences from a series of serious missteps over the last two decades. As the studio's technical writing team revealed at the Digital Dragons Conference in Krakow, structural chaos reigned during the creation of milestones such as "The Witcher 1" and "The Witcher 3".
In its early days, the then-small studio relied entirely on oral lore. Lacking a central knowledge database, today's developers have to painstakingly reconstruct the old systems through reverse engineering. These gaps became particularly apparent during the development of "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt."
After the project's supposed completion, management shut down the internal wiki for cost reasons without backing up the data. Years later, when the modding tool REDkit was to be created, all trial drivers and engine documentation were missing. The data had to be reconstructed using roundabout methods and old IT servers.
Cyberpunk 2077 revealed the chaos
The documentation chaos reached its most disastrous proportions during the eight-year development of "Cyberpunk 2077." The immense scope of the role-playing game resulted in over 8.000 pages of documents that were no longer maintained during the final release phase. For the expansion "Phantom Liberty" and the Mac port, the studio also split the documents between local servers and cloud services.
This fragmentation led to extreme inefficiency and, according to the studio, measurably contributed to the burnout risk within the team. Only the card game Gwent was efficiently maintained through continuous documentation updates, allowing new employees to be trained immediately.
For upcoming major projects such as “The Witcher 4" and "Cyberpunk 2“Stricter guidelines now apply. Internally, a milestone is only considered complete when the documentation is error-free. Since CD Projekt Red now operates globally and teams in North America and Europe work in different time zones, written documentation replaces direct communication. Furthermore, the teams working on The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2 share the same knowledge base. If one team finds a technical solution for Unreal Engine 5, the other department can directly adopt the code.”
The switch to a strict documentation requirement has a direct impact on the quality and life cycle of upcoming games:
- Increased stability at launch: Since technical solutions and causes of errors are transparently documented, the risk of a faulty release like Cyberpunk 2077 in 2020 decreases.
- Faster updates and DLCs: New developers can work on post-launch content without a long training period, which reduces the waiting time for expansions.
- More efficient modding tools: The likelihood of timely and mature modding tools modeled after REDkits increases, as the games' engines have been documented from the beginning.
- Seamless remakes: External partners like Fool's Theory (responsible for The Witcher 1 Remake) receive precise templates instead of having to guess old game mechanics without documentation.
Behind the seemingly dry restructuring of internal bureaucracy lies a fundamental strategic realignment. The switch from the old, proprietary REDengine to Unreal Engine 5 is supported by the new documentation infrastructure.
CD Projekt Red is tackling the structural problems that ruined the launch of "Cyberpunk 2077" at their root cause. If the developers maintain their self-imposed documentation requirements throughout the entire production phase, it will not only ensure the quality of "The Witcher 4" but also accelerate the development of all subsequent projects.
