The Witcher A new Saga Begins
- Thread starter eastmen
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Deleted member 11852
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Fascinating that they are ditching the REDengine, having just ported it to current gen for Cyberpunk 2077 and presumably Witcher 3 in this engine will appear soon. Maybe it was the porting experience that made them rethink.
An engine is a tangle of frustrations without modern tools to facilitate game development.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Considering the work they've done, I'm wondering how much of it is upper management pushing for UE5 due to bad publicity with CP2077's launch year and how much of it is the actual engineers wanting to make the switch.
Regards,
SB
It was only 5 min ago when everyone looked at that Matrix demo and wished that everything would be developed on UE5 from that day forward. Well here we are!
Silent_Buddha
Legend
It was only 5 min ago when everyone looked at that Matrix demo and wished that everything would be developed on UE5 from that day forward. Well here we are!
Not everyone.
I certainly don't want that, although I do hope that more engines go that direction of focusing more on world geometry as that aspect is sorely lacking in a lot of games. At the very least it's at least as important as getting good lighting in games.Regards,
SB
This was already the case with ue3. I could tell you a game was using ue3 before the first second of gameplay had passed.
cheapchips
Veteran
I'm sure they have talented enough folks to roll their own cluster based system and wizzy lighting. They'd be holding up production developing that and you're still left with the questions of how good are REDEngine's tools? Cyberpunk's development was brutal, by all accounts. The launch kerfuffle was just a symptom.
Epic built a demo city that's technically more impressive, with a team of 60, in less time than it took CDPR to roll out a nextgen patch for Cyberpunk. CDPR management don't have the best reputation, but hard not to see the engine switch as a sensible business and creative decision for a 'one game at a time' studio.
cheapchips
Veteran
This ex-CDPR chap who was on the tech side isn't a fan of the decision.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Yeah, it's not uncommon for upper management to decide to switch to a different engine (UE, Unity, Frostbite, etc.) from an in-house engine and think they don't need as many engineers dedicated to the engine. So they cut back on engine engineers and then disaster ensues. Very rarely does using a different engine result in significantly lower engineering resources compared to using and expanding an existing engine.
The main reason for that is that you still need significant engineering resources to tailor another engine for your specific project and then get it up to speed WRT optimizing performance for your project.
There are certainly potential advantages to using a 3rd party engine, but it's not nearly as cut and dry as upper management thinks. And it rarely saves as much money as they believe it will.
Regards,
SB
The main reason for that is that you still need significant engineering resources to tailor another engine for your specific project and then get it up to speed WRT optimizing performance for your project.
There are certainly potential advantages to using a 3rd party engine, but it's not nearly as cut and dry as upper management thinks. And it rarely saves as much money as they believe it will.
Regards,
SB
When we consider how much they struggled in terms of performance on certain platforms or hardware vendors with the previous engine, the switch to UE5 was a sensible decision. They were quickly reaching performance limitations on their own proprietary in-house engine which wasn't going to be sustainable in future projects without any major refactoring. Given the options, spending an extended amount of down time to improve their own engine before they could even begin their next project wasn't the acceptable alternative compared to using a commercial engine which could already meet most of their technical requirements ...
it's unusual that something that John says, I don't agree with, but in this case I disagree on the Cyberpunk 2077 vs TW3 comparison --I dont have Cyberpunk, I gotta admit, but even it it's better, I don't like the city setting on games -GTA, Cyberpunk, etc-.
Other than that, I agree with him. It's such a waste that a great engine dies just to use a "generic" engine.
I usually preferred Crytek's engines to Unreal. Still remember in the X360 era, from 2007 to 2013 or so, how EVERY game running on Unreal Engine on the X360 looked artistically/aesthetically about the same. I knew when a game was running on Unreal engine just by looking at it.
- Grey
- Poor antialiasing 'cos of incompatibilities with eDRAM usage.
- Most characters looked like marines (it was fun on Gears of War, it wasn't fun afterwards)
- Either that or they looked like american football players on artificial stimulants
- A petroleum jelly effect covering the screen (something to make up for the lack of good AA)
CD Projekt engines weren't perfect either -the simulation of the vegetation swaying with the wind om TW3 always looked a bit exaggerated to me-. But from TW1 -loved playing that game on my laptop at the time, good memories- to TW2, to TW3, they managed to evolve the engine in amazing ways. In fact it was one of the very few engines where a game managed to match Skyrim's strong points.
It's not a great engine. It's a mess. So many things scrapped, redone, then hacked for their REDEngine. Read the tweet thread from a former CDPR dev --
Me too. Damn splash screens!
cheapchips
Veteran
DG article:
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...lly-the-best-choice-for-the-next-witcher-game
I did think Rich's 30 fps comments were a bit too much of a generalisation. I'd expect that this new Witcher game is 30fps, but we already know that The Coalition are happy that 60fps is possible with Lumen and Nanite for some console games.
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...lly-the-best-choice-for-the-next-witcher-game
I did think Rich's 30 fps comments were a bit too much of a generalisation. I'd expect that this new Witcher game is 30fps, but we already know that The Coalition are happy that 60fps is possible with Lumen and Nanite for some console games.
it's a mess? Yes, a mess that works, just like Celeste is a great game but the code is a mess, convoluted in just like a single file containing it. It works. Could be better? Yeah, that's for sure.
They could build upon previous engines and fix the problems of their current engine. It won't happen and that makes me sad, 'cos there are less engines left to develop AAA games. Crytek imho were the best at building engines and rendering technologies.
After the UE3 -I think this was the engine during the X360 era-, UE4 fixed a few things and games like Life is Strange were created. Still, I never felt "comfortable" with anything UE.
At least most fighting games nowadays look totally different, yet they use the Unreal Engine.
I am quite surprised by the fact that Richard's mention in the DF article that TW2 and TW3 plus Cyberpunk were created with in-house engines. Not The Witcher 1?
That's my favourite TW game btw.
