I hope they build in jumping and do not change the combat system too much.
CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5
221–228 of 228 posts
Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5
#222Earlier 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.
In Cyberpunk 2077: you can go from one end of the open world to the other, without ever seeing a loading screen, you can even install a mod that allows your car to fly and you can see the whole city from the top, I haven't seen a game like that in UE5 at that level therefore there is a possibility that it would struggle with something like that if it's not designed to cope with it.
Video games use a trick called Level Of Detail, which means if something is far away, you only render a very low definition version of that object, UE5 has it as well, however we don't know if it's capable enough for something like Night City, obviously the RED engine was built with a very hardcore LOD system that might be a massive pain to do in UE5.
Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Heck, something like Witcher 1 is relatively easy to pull off in UE5.
XCom did it in UE3.5.
Witcher 3 being a third person game with no fast movement is also very doable. There's a plenty of adventure games made in UE using stteaming mechanics.
The moment you as cars or planes it gets much trickier. There's no example of UE5 flight sim I know of, for instance...
We had janky vehicles in UE way back when in the old Unreal Tournament 2003 - but that did not involve streaming levels.
Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5
#224Earlier 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.
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 r…
Awesome answer. Thanks for those examples, makes a ton of sense!
I just assumed in 99% of cases, you could just "tweak" Unreal but if its issues with core components of the engine... I could see why an engine from scratch may work better.
Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5
#225Earlier 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.
In Cyberpunk 2077: you can go from one end of the open world to the other, without ever seeing a loading screen, you can even install a mod that allows your car to fly and you can see the whole city from the top, I haven't seen a game like that in UE5 at that level therefore there is a possibility that it would struggle with something like that if it's not designed to cope with it. Video games use a trick called Leve…
So the investment into seeing if UE5 would work with something like CP2077 would be greater than the investment into a new engine? Or perhaps the risks are greater? I could see getting 75% of the way there and realizing its starting to buckle would be pretty detrimental.
Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
The easiest dumb answer is that Rockstar has never licensed RAGE to an external developer and presumably doesn't develop the engine with that in mind at all so it is probably under-documented and hard to work with for any team that isn't Rockstar. Also, I think there are other engines that do as well as RAGE, but none of them are licensed for external use either and are secret sauce to their various developers.
I think that’s fairly self-evident, hence my inclusion of “in theory” :) Are there other internal engines that have been used for open-world games with detail and scale at the level of GTA or RDR?
Just off the top of my head:
Volition's multiple unnamed/unbranded engines for the Saints Row franchise.
The RenderWare fork used for Crackdown 1. The unknown engine for Crackdown 2 (presumed to be an iteration of the Crackdown 1 engine). (Crackdown 3 used Unreal Engine 4. Useful to mention for those elsewhere in this thread concerned Unreal "can't" do it.)
You can argue that BioWare has tried its raw best to push EA DICE's Frostbite engine as much as possible in that direction. DAI and MEA didn't have truly seamless open-world games, but they tried to get the biggest scale of levels that Frostbite seemed capable of and at their best felt "close". (Obviously at their worst they felt nothing at all like GTA/RDR level of detail/size.)
Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Cyberpunk 2077: you can go from one end of the open world to the other, without ever seeing a loading screen, you can even install a mod that allows your car to fly and you can see the whole city from the top, I haven't seen a game like that in UE5 at that level therefore there is a possibility that it would struggle with something like that if it's not designed to cope with it. Video games use a trick called Leve…
So the investment into seeing if UE5 would work with something like CP2077 would be greater than the investment into a new engine? Or perhaps the risks are greater? I could see getting 75% of the way there and realizing its starting to buckle would be pretty detrimental.
Looking at the Witcher 2, 3 and CP2077, I'm highly skeptical that the engine was the problem.
I also have my doubts if they would haven been able to do the same thing better on older consoles with Unreal Engine.
Most of the worst issues with CP2077 have nothing to do with the game engine, things like the NPC AI and broken difficulty curve, the rough melee combat and hiring a shady testing company.
The one thing that could be blamed on the engine is the potentially difficult tooling for the content creators, which can easily be solved, just look at the amount of mods out there.
From the outside, this looks more like a business decision rather than a technical one, that's not to say that it could not work out for CDPR if Epic works with them very closely, however I'm very annoyed when games journalists imply that CP2077 would have been amazing at launch if they would have used Unreal.
Re: CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that’s fairly self-evident, hence my inclusion of “in theory” :) Are there other internal engines that have been used for open-world games with detail and scale at the level of GTA or RDR?
Just off the top of my head: Volition's multiple unnamed/unbranded engines for the Saints Row franchise. The RenderWare fork used for Crackdown 1. The unknown engine for Crackdown 2 (presumed to be an iteration of the Crackdown 1 engine). (Crackdown 3 used Unreal Engine 4. Useful to mention for those elsewhere in this thread concerned Unreal "can't" do it.) You can argue that BioWare has tried its raw best to push EA…
Thanks for the list!