remakes are great and appeal to gamers who may have missed out on a generation. I loved Witcher 3 and never played witcher 1. I'd rather keep my existing hardware and play a remake than pay for upgraded hardware and play a dud.
CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5
161–170 of 228 posts
Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Not bad, considering Witcher 3 volume includes a portable Switch release. I've seen the Switcher. Wasn't actually half as bad as I anticipated. All the more surprising that CDPR is abandoning their own engine in favour of UE5.
I don't think they're abandoning it, they are just going to hire a new team to remake W1 in Unreal Engine, while the core team works on new games using proprietary tools
Actually no, they announced some time ago that the next Witcher games (a trilogy) would be made with UE5.
Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 Witc…
I remember Neverwinter Nights 2. Decently fun game, but extremely buggy. It had some strange local lag where it wasn’t that unusual to command a character to move only to have them freeze in place then teleport back where they were 10 seconds before.
NWN2 was such an odd duck from an engine reuse perspective. When development on NWN2 began, Obsidian was handed a much older version of the Aurora engine source than what was currently available. While they did do amazing work with what they had, many weird bugs that were addressed by updated versions of mainline Aurora were now things Obsidian had to address in addition to the challenges they had to update the engine for the new game.
Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
To add to that (since I'm somewhat of an expert on this), the engine for Cyberpunk 2077 was completely rewritten from scratch, and only small bits were either ported from W3 or inspired by what was done in W3.
Huh that’s super interesting — full rewrites aren’t super common. Do you know why they elected to rewrite the engine completely?
I have to be careful here, but the simple reason is that the previous engine was not designed to handle the density nor the verticality of the CP77 world.
Not that Unreal Engine 5 can handle a world like CP77 either, despite what people may think with the Matrix demo.
Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5
#165> Now we know that it's a ground-up remake of the game that introduced Geralt of Rivia to Witcher fans outside of Poland. I was always of the impression that it was Witcher III that achieved this. I'm Polish so I genuinely don't know. Were the previous two installments popular outside of Poland?
Witcher 1 & 2 were popular within the PC RPG niche in France. It attracted the same types that were into Neverwinter Nights, Gothic 2, Morrowind etc.
Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5
#166Sometimes 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.
Witcher 1 has a decent story and world (in no small part due to the source material). But the gameplay itself is some of the worst that you experience.
They could have redone it as a Carmen San Diego style dialog game and it would have been better than the turd they shipped. It's really quite bad.
Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5
#167Sometimes 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.
I'd hesitate to even call Witcher 1 the same genre as the later 2. The original's combat is just a blend of old school crpg and oddly rhythm games (with the sword styles all requiring clicking in a different rhythm pattern)
Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh that’s super interesting — full rewrites aren’t super common. Do you know why they elected to rewrite the engine completely?
I have to be careful here, but the simple reason is that the previous engine was not designed to handle the density nor the verticality of the CP77 world. Not that Unreal Engine 5 can handle a world like CP77 either, despite what people may think with the Matrix demo.
Game dev isn't my field, I always find it fascinating though.
Why can't Unreal handle something like CP2077? Could be an "explain like I'm five" - details would be cool but I'm not sure I would even fully understand them, haha.
Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5
#169Remakes 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…
There was a UE5 Engine demo that used Witcher-like environments in their tech demo.
Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Their stock price is near 5 year low, how can they afford it? Stock price has nothing to do with how much money CDPR has in their bank accounts. Stock trading is basically a public opinion poll on the future of the company, but not a penny from those trades actually goes to company accounts.
and if a company is trading low, their trust is also low, am I wrong? They would will need to trick people into giving them money upfront (preorders?) or borrow from 3rd party to cover a product that will sell and bring cash. nevertheless, I didn't mean they can't fund it because of low stock price, they got lots of free money from Polish government development fund, but CDPR delivered only 4 big games and only 2 wer…
> hey would will need to trick people into giving them money upfront (preorders?) or borrow from 3rd party to cover a product that will sell and bring cash.
My take on that is that with Witcher games and even with Cyberpunk they made a lot of money. In fact they made the amounts not often seen in Polish economy (I think at some point they were most valuable company in Poland). They should have a lot of cash saved, no need to borrow money.
EDIT: In fact I did find the info about their cash reserves and they are about $220M, which might not seem much from US perspective, but in Poland it is equivalent to their 3 years expenses.