The first Witcher game might have looked very different without a helping hand from Canada. On October 21, 2026, as reports spread that Electronic Arts has closed BioWare, CD Projekt joint CEO Michał Nowakowski took to X to thank the studio behind Baldur’s Gate, Mass Effect and Dragon Age, calling BioWare “a massive part of CDPR history”.
From Baldur’s Gate boxes to The Witcher
Nowakowski explained that the friendship goes back to CD Projekt’s early days as a publisher, when the company localized and sold BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate games in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. That relationship carried over when CD Projekt Red started making its own RPG. BioWare lent the young studio its engine for The Witcher, shared its experience, and even gave the team a spot at its E3 booth.
The engine in question was Aurora, the technology BioWare built for Neverwinter Nights. According to PC Gamer, CD Projekt Red showed an early build of The Witcher running on it behind a curtain on BioWare’s stand at E3 2004, years before Geralt woke up in Kaer Morhen and made his way to the streets of Vizima in the finished 2007 game.
Nowakowski added that he had visited BioWare in Edmonton several times and hosted its developers in CD Projekt Red’s Warsaw office. He said he was sad for the people affected and for the loss of a legendary name, and described the closure as a bad day for the games industry.
Other CDPR voices
He was not the only one at the studio to react. As GamesRadar+ reported, longtime CDPR developer Paweł Sasko wrote that Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 shaped his imagination and his wish to make games, and that BioWare lit the spark behind his career. Nobody at CD Projekt has suggested any business link to BioWare’s closure; the posts are personal tributes.
What it means for the Witcher Remake
Nothing changes in practice. The remake of the original game is being rebuilt from scratch in Unreal Engine 5 and, as we covered in The Path Ahead, it is currently waiting on the tools being created for The Witcher 4, with no release window. Still, the tribute is a reminder of how much the series owes to that Aurora-powered first outing, the game where Triss Merigold and Geralt’s amnesia storyline first played out on screen.
If you want to revisit where it all began, the Witcher 1 Hub covers the original game’s quests, monsters and story, and the Witcher 2 Hub and Witcher 3 Hub pick up the trilogy from there.
