This week, we report from two international events: DevGAMM Gdańsk and Unreal Fest Chicago.

First, in the second instalment of our Edge In Person series, Jörg Tittel has a chat with CD Projekt Red's Michał Nowakowski. The co-CEO tells us about the studio's redemption arc since Cyberpunk 2077, why the switch to Unreal Engine was a necessity for The Witcher 4, and his doubts around generative AI as a tool for making games.

Next, we break down the myriad announcements from this week's State Of Unreal presentation at Unreal Fest in Chicago, including news that AI integration is now native in Unreal Engine 5.8 and the latest information on what looks set to be a revolutionary upgrade with Unreal Engine 6.

The second instalment of our Edge In Person series took place yesterday, with Jörg Tittel interviewing CD Projekt Red joint CEO Michał Nowakowski on stage at DevGAMM Gdańsk. 

The fireside chat touched upon CDPR's "redemption arc" post-Cyberpunk 2077's release and its switch to Unreal Engine, among many other topics. Here are highlights of the discussion. 

CD Projekt Red is spinning many plates at the moment, working on The Witcher 4, a remake of the original Witcher game, Project Hadar (its first original IP), Project Sirius (a new title set in the Witcher universe), and Cyberpunk 2. 

Nowakowski reminisced about Cyberpunk 2077's troubled launch, acknowledging how "heartbreaking" the period was for the studio. At the time, he saw the company's reputation as its "biggest asset," so fixing the title's trajectory was of utmost importance. The studio did so successfully, with Cyberpunk 2077 ultimately selling 35 million copies.

But some apologies, Nowakowski conceded, are never enough. 

"I'm not 100 per cent convinced we went through the full redemption arc," he said. "I'm convinced that we lost the faith of some people indefinitely, and that's a fair thing. But I do hope we will be able to make it back – if not with The Witcher 4, then with whatever comes next." 

The aftermath of Cyberpunk had one silver lining, he revealed: "We were left with seasoned, battle-hardened veterans; leaders who were able to carry a different kind of challenge on their shoulders." It's that seniority, plus a positive financial situation, that now facilitates the studio's ability to juggle so many projects. 

"Our dream is to be making more games, although we never want to turn into the studio that's going to be launching a big game every year. It may happen, but this is not the goal. We have a rough ten-year rolling plan, but the goal is not to flood the games market with CDPR games. We just want to make really cool games, and we don't want to have a ton of IPs either. We're not planning to grow in that way." 

Whatever comes next will come with the support of Epic Games, with CDPR making the switch from its proprietary tech to Unreal Engine 5 for The Witcher 4. The original Witcher ran on a modified version of BioWare's Aurora Engine, which Nowakowski says "was not a great fit to make the kind of RPGs we wanted to make." That led CDPR to create Red Engine, which it used up to Cyberpunk 2077. 

"A lot of people don't realise that, even though the Red Engines had numbers, they were not exactly built on the shoulders of the previous one. Realistically, because all of those games were pretty different, we were building a new engine almost from scratch for every single game, which was very time consuming." 

This mammoth task cut into the team's output. "Hiring was difficult. Onboarding for Red Engine was six to nine months, which is crazy," Nowakowski continued. "And there were no Red Engine experts out there. It just didn't exist, because it was a proprietary engine." 

The decision to switch to Unreal came after Epic showed CDPR its Matrix demo before it was made public. CDPR ultimately bagged a strong collaboration with Epic, and the privileged position to be able to add proprietary tech on top of Unreal. 

"Epic [allowed] us to go into the black box of Unreal Engine – I think we're the only company right now that actually does that outside of Epic themselves – and fiddle with [it], so [we] would actually be co-building one of the biggest techs out there. The rationale was we wanted to be able to tell more stories without worrying about the foundation of the engine itself. Epic [gave] us that backbone, and we can still build around that and differentiate ourselves."

There is no ignoring the current challenges facing the industry, and Nowakowski touched upon its fragmentation across triple-A, indies, double-A, mobile, and a "whole Roblox industry." To keep above water, he extolled the virtues of being "lean and cheap." 

"There's an unprecedented number of games being launched every year, and the fight for attention is tougher than it ever was. In the end, whether you can continue making games largely depends on whether you were successful enough to fund another project of your own. If you're lean and cheap, and are able to really target the group you want and live off that, then you're in a good spot. 

"I think the toughest spot is somewhere in the middle, where your costs are not insignificant any more, you may not necessarily have a brand or [a] target group [that] is very faithful, and actually getting back the money to fund your next project may not be easy." 

He noted that audiences largely underestimate how difficult it is to make games, especially in the AI era. He mentioned the increasing number of companies relying on generative AI and said he "knows for a fact" that a wave of games made purely with AI are incoming. 

"I was in a conversation with a person who started a studio and was telling me: 'I'm running a primarily AI-based studio. I can have 40 prototypes within a week, two weeks from now I can have five games that I chose are going to be the best and, three weeks from now, I'm actually launching a game'." 

Nowakowski sighed. "Maybe that's going to be successful, but I have some doubts whether this is really the path to follow." 

Concluding the hour-long discussion, Tittel asked Nowakowski how he sees the future of interactive entertainment, and the role CDPR is going to play within it. On the business front, he believes in the longevity of consoles, though he's unsure he'll still be able to say the same in ten years. 

"But they're not going anywhere anytime super soon. The method of delivery is going to be secondary to how you're [putting] together the stuff you're making. The big, tricky point is going to be how to put it in front of [people]. I don't think it's going to be getting any easier in terms of the number of games being produced. This is going to continue to be the trickiest point, but as long as you have a fresh idea, with a soul, with legs, you should have a genuine shot at being successful. 

"And you should be trying your own stuff, because I think success doesn't have to mean the same thing [to everyone]. There's room for a lot of game industries and genres to coexist. I don't think anybody should feel pressed to be the next… Bethesda, Techland, CD Projekt. You can be yourself, and as long as you feel you have achieved success, you can live another day to do something else. Be happy with your scale. Somebody else's dream doesn't have to be your dream."

The State Of Unreal 2026 presentation in Chicago this week outlined the latest, extensive additions to the current version of Unreal Engine, while announcing first concrete details on what to expect from Unreal Engine 6. For the time-challenged among you, here are the main takeaways. 

1) UE5.8 is available now 

Unreal Engine 5.8 is now available for download, and is expected to be the last dot version before UE6. The additions in this version are, frankly, impressive. Included is Mesh Terrain, a system for "authoring larger, more complex terrains," as is the Procedural Vegetation Editor, which allows you to grow "high-quality, biologically correct, Nanite-ready vegetation from scratch".

UE's rigging system has also been upgraded, and now includes Direct Mesh Controls (which allow animators to manipulate models via surfaces, not just skeletons) and much more. Other features include the ability to motion capture from ordinary video, and MegaLights, the multiple-lighting system demoed in use in Gears Of War: E-Day. You can read about everything you'll get in the new release in this blog post. 

But, of course, the most headline-worthy inclusion is… 

2) AI now plugs directly into UE5 

Unreal Engine 5.8 includes the MCP (Model Context Protocol) plugin, removing the need for the various workarounds users had already implemented. This allows you to expose your UE project to any LLM, including Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT. The plugin ships with built-in exposure to core UE systems including Blueprints, assets, levels, materials, meshes and more, and you can extend it as you please.

Epic demoed the MCP plugging Claude CoWork into an Unreal project, with the operator typing prompts into a terminal window and the LLM enacting requests in-engine. You can now use prompts to build environments, add lighting, create in-engine models from reference images, edit Blueprints, map cities and beyond. Regardless of how you view AI, the ramifications of the inclusion of these tools in Unreal Engine are likely to be profound. The MCP demonstration begins at 42 minutes in the presentation.

3) MetaHuman now has an MIT license 

MetaHuman, Epic's cloud-based tool for creating near-photorealistic, fully rigged digital human characters for use in Unreal Engine, has now been published under an MIT licence. That means it's free for all commercial use and adaptation with no restrictions. MetaHuman Collections are included in UE5.8, allowing you to populate games with crowds of "people". There's a MetaHuman Crowds Sample on Fab, the Unreal Engine asset store, allowing you to play with spaces filled with thousands of MetaHumans. Also now available is the ability to turn any human mesh into a MetaHuman. The fact all of this is provided completely for free for "any game, any engine, any platform" under the MIT license plays directly into Tim Sweeney's apparently libertarian view of technological advancement (see point 5). 

4) UE6 is based on Verse and hits early access late next year("ish") 

Unreal Engine 6 is now confirmed as largely replacing C++ with Verse, Epic's proprietary language, as the core programming system, and will combine Unreal Engine and Unreal Editor For Fortnite (UEFN) into one platform. Visual scripting using Blueprints is to be phased out eventually and replaced with some other form of coding to sit over Verse, although this process is likely to take years. Projects created in Unreal Engine 6 are to be based on the "entirely new gameplay framework known collectively as Scene Graph" which has been evolving in UEFN since 2024.

While the UE6 vision presented this week was still nebulous, it's certainly grand. The engine, said Epic, is "about how we ship and operate our games," and is being built on the premise that coding needs to get simpler in terms of creating very large gameplay environments for huge numbers of players. Open access remains at the forefront, the idea being that content and code will be portable across games and other engines, all in the name of "interoperability".

AI will be native from the start in UE6 as a way to "tighten iteration loops and reduce manual setup". Epic sees LLM integration as a way of reducing manual work, such as adjusting lighting, constructing character rigs and skinning bone weights, to allow humans to concentrate on more creative aspects. LLMs are seen as playing a "central role" in development from this release onwards, with code creation another key function for AI. 

Read about everything shown on Unreal Engine 6 here. 

5) Epic wants "a system with no overlord" 

The defining aspect of this week's presentation was the persistent subtext of opensourcing and mass-scale collaboration. Tim Sweeney is an outspoken open-market advocate and antitrust crusader, and his vision of open access to these tools is directly affecting the direction of their development. Examples include the aforementioned MIT license for MetaHuman, the adoption of open standards (such as the USD file format) and the promise to create open standards for any piece of Unreal Engine that necessitates it in the future.

Sweeney talked of creating a "unified set of APIs and a unified language that works anywhere" with the potential to have "millions" of developers working together on shared bodies of work. Unreal Engine is being designed to build games at "any scale," and it seems clear the idea for the project is general unification. Unreal Engine 6 will be for everyone, said Sweeney, not just the "overlords" with which Sweeney, a billionaire himself, holds so much truck. 

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Highlights from industry chat channels

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Given Asobo's success with 2019's A Plague Tale: Innocence and sequel A Plague Tale: Requiem, it's a bold move to sideline a signature characteristic in this way, but then Resonance isn't following directly in the footsteps of those games. Rather, it's a spinoff, putting players in control of Sophia, one of the companion characters from A Plague Tale: Requiem, and setting the action some 15 years prior to the events of the previous games. In Edge 425, on sale now, we visit Asobo's Bordeaux HQ to discover how it's pushing in a new direction – and why that doesn't involve screens full of teeming rodents. 

In this issue's other lead features, we talk to Metroidvania masters including Billy Basso and Thomas Happ to sift through the complexities of the ever-growing genre, and meet with composers such as Jesper Kyd, Nainita Desai and Richard Jacques to discover the craft behind the modern videogame soundtrack. In The Making Of…, we chart the difficult process of reinventing Solium Infernum with League Of Geeks, and visit UK developer Jagex for Studio Profile to dig into its ongoing journey with RuneScape. 

With 007 First Light headlining this issue's reviews, we continue the Bond theme by revisiting From Russia With Love in Time Extend, while in Hype we preview forthcoming releases such as End Of Abyss, Ace Combat 8: Wings Of Theve, Godzone 6 and The Sinking City 2. In Knowledge, we report from BitSummit 2026 and also interview Game Freak's Kota Furushima about breaking away from Pokémon, with Day 4 Night Studios co-founders Christian Cantamessa and Davide Soliani joining us for our Profile slot to discuss the origins of Bradley The Badger.  

If you don't yet have an Edge subscription, there's still time to take advantage of our introductory offer, allowing you to pick up your first three issues for just £5. 

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