This is a smart move imo: they can gain xp and build tooling for unreal 5. Part of what killed their last game is their engine. Now they can learn how to use a real game engine with a lower stakes game and prepare for witcher 4 or whatever comes next.
CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5
141–150 of 228 posts
Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand Geralt waves his sword above his head like an idiot in Witcher 1. I hate remakes but if I had to have one this would be one. https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/rkdbnv/started_play... But yeah I want new stories more.
The top comment in that thread you linked explains that sword movement is something from the books. No one's to say that'll be removed in a remake.
I don't remember him doing that in the books haha. He was a beautiful swordsman not a goofball.
Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5
#143Remakes make business sense. Every game is a risk. A portfolio of products that includes remakes reduces that risk. A game that was previously popular is easier to remaster than trying to make some new that's less tested. There are always brand new gamers to introduce to your IP as well as existing gamers who may have missed or want to replay earlier games. If you're a mature studio it's almost irresponsible to not d…
> The more interesting part of the story is Unreal is being used. For a while Unity and Unreal have been pushing out in-house engines.
This is exactly the case for CD Projekt Red. They built their own engine (RED Engine) for Witcher 1 and built on top of it for the two Witcher sequels and also pushed it to its very limits for Cyberpunk 2077. A lot of useful criticism of the technological pains (delays, marketplace reception issues) they experienced with Cyberpunk was that they were using an in-house game engine unprepared for that genre (jumping from a game series where the fastest vehicle was a horse to one with cars and flying cars and planes is maybe not the easiest straight line). CDPR responded to that criticism, especially from their shareholders, that they would be minimizing that risk in future games development and externalizing that dependency and moving to an out-of-the-box game engine moving forward (including in that announcement that it would be Unreal).
This announcement for the Witcher 1 remake seems like a proper and interesting "full circle" for this story: CDPR's last engine was built entirely for Witcher 1. Using off-the-shelf Unreal to remake Witcher 1 sounds like a smart way on paper to get their feet wet and move on from the old engine to the new one using a project they are already familiar with and can help them realign from old pipelines to new ones.
Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5
#144Remakes make business sense. Every game is a risk. A portfolio of products that includes remakes reduces that risk. A game that was previously popular is easier to remaster than trying to make some new that's less tested. There are always brand new gamers to introduce to your IP as well as existing gamers who may have missed or want to replay earlier games. If you're a mature studio it's almost irresponsible to not d…
> The more interesting part of the story is Unreal is being used. For a while Unity and Unreal have been pushing out in-house engines. This is exactly the case for CD Projekt Red. They built their own engine (RED Engine) for Witcher 1 and built on top of it for the two Witcher sequels and also pushed it to its very limits for Cyberpunk 2077. A lot of useful criticism of the technological pains (delays, marketplace re…
> This is exactly the case for CD Projekt Red. They built their own engine (RED Engine) for Witcher 1 and built on top of it for the two Witcher sequels and also pushed it to its very limits for Cyberpunk 2077.
Close. REDEngine was created for Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. Witcher 1 was built on a modified copy of Bioware's Aurora Engine (the Neverwinter Nights engine).
REDEngine versions were:
REDEngine 1: The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings
REDEngine 2: The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings – Enhanced Edition
REDEngine 3: The Witcher 3
REDEngine 4: Cyberpunk 2077
Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5
#145Sometimes remakes can actually improve accessibility to an older game with a dated engine/mechanics and make it more enjoyable for newcomers to experience the earlier entries. See: Yakuza Kiwami and Yakuza Kiwami 2 (remade using the excellent Yakuza 0 engine/mechanics). I do own Witcher 1/Witcher 2 (bought no-doubt during some Steam sale for like $5-$15, tops), and I vaguely recall playing W1 for like a half hour, th…
I think yours is a pretty common experience considering that Witcher 3 was a huge mass-market success and Witcher 1 was a niche product made both by and for insane people. I say this as a shameless Witcher 1 apologist.
I really wanted to play the games in order, but I found the gameplay in 1 un-fun and quit.
I almost regret how long it put me off 3
Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5
#146Remakes make business sense. Every game is a risk. A portfolio of products that includes remakes reduces that risk. A game that was previously popular is easier to remaster than trying to make some new that's less tested. There are always brand new gamers to introduce to your IP as well as existing gamers who may have missed or want to replay earlier games. If you're a mature studio it's almost irresponsible to not d…
> The more interesting part of the story is Unreal is being used. For a while Unity and Unreal have been pushing out in-house engines. This is exactly the case for CD Projekt Red. They built their own engine (RED Engine) for Witcher 1 and built on top of it for the two Witcher sequels and also pushed it to its very limits for Cyberpunk 2077. A lot of useful criticism of the technological pains (delays, marketplace re…
As far as I remember, the first Witcher engine was a weird mash of the engine from neverwinter nights 2 and their own modifications, and they introduced their own engine with the Witcher 2.
Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5
#147Remakes make business sense. Every game is a risk. A portfolio of products that includes remakes reduces that risk. A game that was previously popular is easier to remaster than trying to make some new that's less tested. There are always brand new gamers to introduce to your IP as well as existing gamers who may have missed or want to replay earlier games. If you're a mature studio it's almost irresponsible to not d…
You'd think using Unreal Engine makes it easier to hire but that's not the case, it just means there's more competition for the people knowledgable in it, and it drives the people that want to work on something different to other studios. It also doesn't cut down on development time or the needed number of engine programmers since studios pretty much have to modify and enhance the engine, often replacing several components in order to ship the game. In some cases you'll end up with an incompatible fork which requires its own team to extend and enhance it, meaning that to upgrade to a newer version from Epic you'll need to spend months merging the codebases.
Overall I see the adoption of Unreal Engine as a net negative for the industry, it's reducing the landscape to a monoculture. For all the talk that Epic does about being against monopolies, Unreal Engine is becoming one in a big way, and killing the ecosystem as it grows.
Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5
#148Sometimes remakes can actually improve accessibility to an older game with a dated engine/mechanics and make it more enjoyable for newcomers to experience the earlier entries. See: Yakuza Kiwami and Yakuza Kiwami 2 (remade using the excellent Yakuza 0 engine/mechanics). I do own Witcher 1/Witcher 2 (bought no-doubt during some Steam sale for like $5-$15, tops), and I vaguely recall playing W1 for like a half hour, th…
I started to play, but never finished, both the first and second Witcher games after also purchasing them on sale at massive discounts. I gained an appreciation for advances made in character movement and player input, including UI elements like menus and pop-ups for quick actions. Old games play very clunky.
Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5
#149People complaining about this being a remake, but I'm assuming they made the remake as a way for their developers to get use to Unreal 5 before making Witcher 4 which is also built using Unreal 5. Easier to build a game you already know in a new game engine than to create a completely new game. Especially if you don't want the game to be filled with bugs. CD has always used in an house game engine for their games.
I don't think that holds if you read the first paragraph of the article. Fool's Theory, a separate studio, is doing the remake in UE5; not CDPR. With that said, this will allow Fool's Theory to help as a support studio for Witcher 4 after the remake since they'll be using the same toolset.
That's true, although Fool's Theory is full of former CDPR people that worked on W3 and CP. I'm assuming it will be a similar situation to that of Spokko where eventually it might be brought under the CDP umbrella. (That's just speculation though, I don't have any insider knowledge on this).
Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5
#150I already played it, so I'm unexcited. Remakes these days generally seem like lazier ways to try to make money compared to making new art from scratch. I thought Cyberpunk was abysmal (though i loved the witcher games) so I wouldn't expect much from them anymore in any case.
What about Cyberpunk was abysmal to you? I really enjoyed the atmosphere and the gun-play. NPC animations left some to be desired, but overall I thought the graphics were super engaging and Night City was super fun to run around in.
Everything with a woman protagonist that tries to ape male roles is probably going to be pretty bad.