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CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5

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Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5

#201

Post by danielbarla »

robswc wrote: post #168
daemin wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not an expert on the topic either, but from similar discussions I've followed, the answer tends to be that out of the box and with the base settings, an engine like UE5 will be optimised for certain use cases. Different genres will have different specific needs, and may require your developers to do a lot of heavy lifting to make the engine performant under their specific conditions. A good example might be sim racing titles, which generally have the player moving a lot faster than the default scenario for an engine (which is mostly a slow-moving FPS, for example). At these relatively high speeds, the default antialiasing methods may result in serious graphical artifacts, and at the rate at which physics needs to be calculated (90-300 hertz) the default physics of the engine may be less useful, and you're forced to implement your own from scratch. That's not to say it's impossible, but you're opting out from a lot of the engine features, or in some cases, it's actively making your life hard.

Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5

#202

Post by sombragris »

I began to play games more since the onset of the pandemic. One of the first games that I played was The Witcher 1. I actually played all three games in the series, but started with the first.

Of all three series, TW1 combat is the one I liked the best (seriously). Once you got the hang of it, it felt quite natural. On the other hand, TW2 combat felt like a stupid regression. TW3 combat was good but not as good as the first installment of the series.

Other things I liked from the first game and I honestly think are the best in all three games:

- lore system and content - signs - alchemy - potions - character progression and development.

Also, it is quite playable on Intel onboard GPUs.

I'm excited to learn that a remake is in the works, but I am afraid that all the above (and also romance cards, due to stupid PC stuff) will be gone in the remake.

Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5

#204

Post by daemin »

P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #200
robswc wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"can't handle" here means "can't handle performantly". Think of it like using the wrong data structure for the problem.

And not just for the game itself but for creating the world in the first place. Often you need radically different data structures for the creation and editing of the data as compared to what you need for running the game on player's machines.

Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5

#205

Post by ajuc »

jpgvm wrote: post #173
duped wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is true. The story carried Witcher 1. Gameplay was vastly improved in 2 and I have mixed feelings about 3, the game was definitely more successful and I think you can partially attribute that to changes that made it easier to play and thus much more console friendly. I for one welcome a UE5 remake of Witcher 1 and will purchase it for sure, if only for nostalgia sake.

Some elements were better. For example potion mechanics was the best in W1. You could only make them near fire which means there was risk/reward and safe places mattered, and the system had some depth with matching secondary ingredients and managing positive and negative side effects.

W2 made alchemy useless cause potions lasted like 3 minutes and cut-scenes were included in that time (so you take a 3 minute potion, enter a 2 minute cut-scene and your potion stops working 1 minute into the boss fight). And W3 made potions less of a hassle by auto-refill but streamlined this too much - you could refill anywhere so you always had potions so resource management wasn't required. And the secondary ingredients and side effects were gone so the system is much simpler.

Also the tactical aspect of combat was ok in W1 - adjusting the fighting style and sword combination to the enemies. It just wasn't an action-RPG despite the action-RPG interface. It would be better served by turn-based combat.

Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5

#206

Post by ajuc »

CD Projekt is outsourcing this to another company to be precise.

I wonder if they will give them their cut-scene creation technology. It was one of the best parts of The Witcher 3 - the cinematography was great and showed the emotions much better than in any CRPG I played to this day.

Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5

#207

Post by daemin »

ethbr0 wrote: post #181
daemin wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comp…

For employ ees of the game industry, aren't standardized engines a net positive? I can't think of many things worse in software development than "I'm an expert on my employer's obscure, only-used-here system." Your employer knows you can't work anywhere else, and assuming they don't shoot themselves in the foot by allowing one person to become mission critical, they've definitely got the power in negotiations.

This is a fairly nuanced question so I'll try to explain some of the reasoning.

Unreal Engine is standard in so far as studios use it as a base in developing their own game, where they end up creating a fork because they need to adapt or more often replace entire systems. So in the end each studio ends up with their own non-standard fork of the engine, branched from a specific revision, and merging the latest changes from upstream will be at least a month long endevour. This is what I know from personal experience and from interviewing at about a dozen studios last year.

With this you get a slightly different version of the engine and tools at each studio, and it affects disciplines differently. For some creatives it ends up being the same at every studio because the tools they interact with remain largely unchanged, for others they end up using custom built tools at each studio. Likewise some programmers are fine just using the engine and developing systems on top, but others are not and it drives a lot of skilled people away.

So as an employee it is a double edged sword, on the one hand there's at least some standardisation where you are at least familiar with the tools and engine used in the new studio you're joining, but on the other hand you're now one in tens-of-thousands and much more of a replacable cog.

That is one of the supposed selling points of Unreal Engine to studios - that they can hire staff more easily - but if every studio uses the same engine then it's not a benefit. It also means that some skilled people won't want to join the studio, as they don't want to rewrite systems or be a code-janitor, and I've heard many people leaving studios because they switched to Unreal.

Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5

#208

Post by daemin »

KVFinn wrote: post #175
daemin wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comp…

Yeah. If a game isn't well suited to Unreal, that game may well just not get made. But then again Factorio is one of the best selling PC games of all time. Maybe gameplay finds a way. On CDPR specifically, I hope didn't make the decision to drop Red Engine because they happened to be at their lowest/weakest point in the last couple years after Cyberpunk came out and before Cyberpunk had a comeback -- and that's why t…

Thanks for the kind words, it means a bunch to me and other devs that worked on the game!

I cannot comment to why they decided to switch to Unreal, but it is one of the reasons I left. I hope it works out for them but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the next game release.

Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5

#210

Post by pjmlp »

sorenjan wrote: post #156
danschuller wrote: post #100

Remakes 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…

I don't follow game development closely anymore, but my feeling is that UE5 with features like Nanite, Lumen, etc is so advanced that you can't expect an inhouse engine to come close. Or are there other engines that's at the same level? Frostbite used to be cutting edge years ago, but some of the developers left EA and I haven't seen any excitement about it since. Add to that things like huge install base that should…

Engines are complex beast nowadays, my graduation thesis was porting a particle engine based visualization engine from NeXTSTEP into Windows.

What was a graduation thesis 20 something years ago, is nowadays a basic feature in a bullet point feature list.

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