Game News CD Projekt announce that the next Witcher game is in development using Unreal Engine 5

[Drowed]

Twiglard, you're just moving the goalpost. It seems like an engine is to you what you want it to be - so in your definition, of course you can pick and choose the games you want and say that used or didn't use engines. But that only makes the point irrelevant.

It doesn't change the fact that many games only came into existence thanks to "external toolkits that offer pre-programmed functions that serve as gears that make specific functions possible without you having to program them directly" (or at least drastically reducing the workload). If you don't want to call it an engine, you can call it blazingacode or whatever else you prefer. Most of the newer games use "blazingacode" as a way to streamline the production and are only possible because of this, even if they don't use "engines" - in which case, engines sound like irrelevant stuff for the point being made here anyways.

 

[Kev Inkline]

Announced to the sound of crickets... Cyberpunk really fucked any and all goodwill these dumbfucks had with a lot of their fans.

don't forget they also angered one of their biggest and loudest fanbois - russians.

Well, Russian sales numbers will remain exactly the same as before.

It's actually very popular in Russia and books too. And russian witcher fanboys are probably even more dumb and annoying than potato branch.

Yes I don’t claim anything to the contrary. I’m just saying they are buying as many copies as before.

 

[ADL]

It says terrible things about their internal capabilities. In the marketing campaign for Witcher 3 they talked a lot about all the tech they had created, including face animation tools, for Red Engine. Switching to an entirely new engine may be worth it for a small studio that can't afford overhead and training people, but it's definitely not good news for a prestigious independent studio that spent actual decades building up its own tech and saw massive dividends from said tech, only to suddenly abandon it after a failed release.

Setting aside the checkered past of suddenly switching to new engines and having to recreate the capabilities you already had in a new engine (see Frostbite and Bioware, it's not a great comparison because Frostbite is much harder to use than UE, and UE is famed for its ease of use, but still), it just does not create confidence in the context of what has happened recently. I don't know how anyone could look at it and see positive things. Maybe say it'll be a wash, sure, but it's not good.

I get how it looks and it seems like they wasted a whole bunch of time and effort on RedEngine but there genuinely wasn't a viable alternative when those games began production. You have to consider that Witcher 3 started production in 2011. Unity was hardly doing 3D at that point and Unreal 3 had just started opening up with a weird licensing model and it was still closed source. Cyberpunk 2077 started production sometime between 2011-2013. At that time, Unreal 4 hadn't even come out yet. If the Witcher trilogy came out today, I doubt CDPR would've ever considered creating their own technology so I don't think it's that big of a deal. The vast majority of companies still working with proprietary game engines would be better off with just using something like GODOT/Unity/Unreal/O3DE/Lumberyard/CryEngine these days.

 

[Reinhardt]

Announced to the sound of crickets... Cyberpunk really fucked any and all goodwill these dumbfucks had with a lot of their fans.

don't forget they also angered one of their biggest and loudest fanbois - russians.

Well, Russian sales numbers will remain exactly the same as before.

It's actually very popular in Russia and books too. And russian witcher fanboys are probably even more dumb and annoying than potato branch.

Yes I don’t claim anything to the contrary. I’m just saying they are buying as many copies as before.

well, as i've said - they are dumb

 

[racofer]

I think it's good they are using Unreal Engine. It's a solid engine and known to work well across different configurations while maintaining good visuals and performance. And we all know CDPR's Red Engine is a buggy mess since The Witcher 2, and little has changed since; some would argue it got worse.

Still, zero interest after Cyberpunk, although I got to admit CDPR has an unique way of presenting a story that makes their games captivating. However, they will also undoubtedly make it an Open World Game™ and waste considerable development time and resources on boring crap nobody cares about and some other game has already made it better 15 years prior. CDPR has shown time and again their strength is on hub-based game design, yet they will not go back to that structure.

Finally, like I said several times already, I consider that all decent games have already been released. I don't feel like spending big bucks on an RTX5090 to be able to play their next game, because CDPR loves the Crytek idea of making a game that will only be playable on hardware released one to two generations after its release. You can grab an indie game that runs on a toaster and delivers a better gaming experience than what these quadruple A studios have been doing these past years.

 

[negator2vc]

Makes sense to get a ready-made engine instead of keep using their own engine.
Their strength is creating good content. Even Cyberpunk 2077 despite all the technical problems was
a well designed game [story, quests, characters].
Beside they were already using Unity for some of the latest games like Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales or the Gwent game.

 

[baud]

Without those engines, the actual golden era of videogames would have never existed and you would still be playing the console-hit like gears of war or whatever shit you prefer from risk-adverse publishers that had the money to make games but not the balls to innovate or put resources in niche games, being niche anything that don't sell millions.

Unreal, unity, godot and some more have completely shaped the modern industry an consumers are grateful for it. You can even design and make videogames without coding a single line, if that's not great I don't know what it is. Games like hoollow knight, return of the obra dinn, cuphead, death door, song of conquest,

That doesn't appear to be true. In the Codexian Top 101 RPG poll, the first game using an 'engine' is Pathfinder: Kingmaker as #14. The next one is Shadowrun: Dragonfall as position #28. Why so few and far between when 'engines' are supposedly essential? If anything, access to 'engines' and asset pipelines put too much pressure on game developers who know how to do their job, to be replaced with zoomer shit-for-brains using 'middleware' and designing levels by using somebody else's tools.

In programming, there's no better way to know how something works than implement it by yourself. You don't necessarily need to improve upon and use such prototype, but it's a necessary step. Too much attention has been focused onto getting things out of the door without knowing its internal representation.

but in the top 101, how many were games developed at a time where such engines weren't available?

And you can add Deus Ex (unreal engine), VtMB (Source) and Age of Decadence (Torgue) to your list of games which used engines.

 

[Twiglard]

but in the top 101, how many were games developed at a time where such engines weren't available?

It's a good thing they weren't available. Bloated budgets and feature checklists only make the developers not take any risks. Games could forever look like HL2 while still ooze atmosphere, have good mechanics and system design, narrative and storytelling, dialogues, art direction, cutscenes and what have you.

Maybe that should've been my original point. Engines in themselves are only tangentially related to the dumbing-down phenomenon.

 

[Naraya]

Plot twist: the new Witcher game is actually a Cyberpunk DLC.

 

[Rincewind]

It's a good thing they weren't available. Bloated budgets and feature checklists only make the developers not take any risks. Games could forever look like HL2 while still ooze atmosphere, have good mechanics and system design, narrative and storytelling, dialogues, art direction, cutscenes and what have you.

You're not making much sense, big studios with bloated budgets are actually in the best position to develop their own in-house engine because they have the resources, and they often do.

Game engines are just tools man, nobody cares about them except for some coders; the end result is all that matters. Even people who "write their own engine" most of the time just string together some battle-tested and robust libraries, middleware, etc. -- writing *everything* from scratch in C++ these days would be sheer insanity. What is the point of reinventing the wheel by writing your own audio subsystem, physics engine, rendering engine, vegetation engine, etc. if there's something out there that does the job perfectly fine already? Developing *anything* has become a much more complex affair than in the 80s & 90s on home computers, especially if you want to target multiple platforms. If these (mostly) free to use engines didn't exist, basically only big companies with tons of money could develop anything these days (barring for a few extremely talented, technical and dedicated people, who are in short supply compared to folks who are minimally technical but are artistic and have some good ideas).

Tell me with a straight face that the world would be a better place if essentially single-man projects such as Ghost of a Tale, Return of the Obra Dinn or Monomyth didn't exist. I have a hard time imagining how these projects could have manifested without the existence of high quality, free to use game engines that you so much despise. Small game developers such as Mimimi must consist of some extremely stupid people to use Unity for all their games in a row. I guess these "zoomer shit-for-brains" (your words) mouthbreathers never learn!

In any case, looking forward to your next-level game entirely done with your own custom engine that shows the world how it should be done! I'm sure it will be available on PC, Mac, Linux, Xbox and PS5, and we'll all learn from it!

(Btw, this is an interesting discussion about the custom engine topic, plus this small comparative study is also quite informative).

 

[Wyatt_Derp]

Announced to the sound of crickets... Cyberpunk really fucked any and all goodwill these dumbfucks had with a lot of their fans.

That and the poor sons'a bitches who held onto CDPR stock after Cyberpunk's release.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

Small game developers such as Mimimi must consist of some extremely stupid people to use Unity for all their games in a row. I guess these "zoomer shit-for-brains" (your words) mouthbreathers never learn!

There's nothing inherently wrong with Unity if you know how to use it properly. There are some major drawbacks to the renderer (it can't do shadows well at all) and there are inconsistencies with its editors, collision detection leaves a bit to be desired, but otherwise, I've found the engine very robust for what it can do. But a lot of developers that use Unity are only interested in producing low-quality titles. It certainly is a lot more common that a developer be familiar with Unity compared to Unreal, Cryengine and Godot because it's easier professionally to become a developer for that technology because of how common its use is.

I do think Unreal is a very good choice for AAA studios, especially compared to CryEngine because it has a toolset to alleviate some of the workflow slowdowns such as LOD assets. But Unreal is only ever going to be a niche case for the industry because the majority of the users that have to be able to produce anything commercial with it have to be very good at what they do. It's not an easy engine to master. This is why Unity is chosen by so many developers because it is a fairly easy engine to master but people use it incorrectly and it got a justifiably bad reputation because of that fact.

I would have said a few years ago building a new engine would make sense because there was a lack of Vulkan support from all the popular engines, however now they all pretty much support it including Unity.

 

[Twiglard]

Game engines are just tools man, nobody cares about them except for some coders; the end result is all that matters. Even people who "write their own engine" most of the time just string together some battle-tested and robust libraries, middleware, etc.

writing *everything* from scratch in C++ these days would be sheer insanity. What is the point of reinventing the wheel by writing your own audio subsystem, physics engine, rendering engine, vegetation engine, etc. if there's something out there that does the job perfectly fine already? Developing *anything* has become a much more complex affair than in the 80s & 90s on home computers, especially if you want to target multiple platforms.

The optimal level of abstraction when implementing audio subsystems is to grab a library for decoding mp3 or ogg data, then feed the waveform to openal or a similar library. The 'engine' way would be to import individual samples to automatically include them in packed asset data, and grab positional data for surround sound implicitly from the emitter in the scene graph.

In any case, looking forward to your next-level game entirely done with your own custom engine that shows the world how it should be done! I'm sure it will be available on PC, Mac, Linux, Xbox and PS5, and we'll all learn from it!

Chasing next-gen graphics and platforms hasn't made RPGs better.

Physics engines haven't made RPGs better.

Vegetation generation hasn't made RPGs better.

Big budgets and resultant ROI pressures haven't made RPGs better.

The art direction differences from Fallout (distinctive) to Arcanum (drab, ugly) sprites made a bigger difference than all this.

And on the subject -- chasing the open-world gameplay formula hasn't made Cyberpunk any better.

Getting in the above mainstream-centric mindset hasn't made the Kritikal Kodex Konsensus better.

Risen 1 looks sufficiently well for an immersive 3D RPG in 2022. So does Witcher 1. AoD, ATOM, and Underrail look well in their own rights. Do I even need to mention playing Bloodlines in 2022, with no texture mods in 4K and still being perfectly satisfied with it? Or just play Highfleet and see how 2D graphics with mostly no lighting make for the single most atmospheric game in this, or the last decade.

 

[Rincewind]

Chasing next-gen graphics and platforms hasn't made RPGs better.
...

We certainly agree on all that, but they're just tools. More tool = better. Free tools, even better. Might as well blame electricity for all the new shit games we're getting

 

[Twiglard]

Chasing next-gen graphics and platforms hasn't made RPGs better.
...

We certainly agree on all that, but they're just tools. More tool = better. Free tools, even better. Might as well blame electricity for all the new shit games we're getting

Your statement would imply that it's good that the Eclipse IDE exists. Therefore it must be wrong. QED.

 

[Hag]

More tool = better. Free tools, even better. Might as well blame electricity for all the new shit games we're getting

That's a logical fallacy. Home electricity is a single tool : 230V/50Hz or 110V/60Hz or something similar depending on where you live. You don't get to choose and all appliances use the same rating, and you have to pay dearly for it.
More tools = going to the hardware store to buy a cordless power tool and finding ten different brands, each with its own incompatible battery design and power rating.

Believing more tools = better is a dangerous fallacy creeping all over the IT and DIY world. More tools = more tools. More shit to assess, more shit to learn to use, more shit to track, more shit to buy, more ways to fuck up. Creativity can actually stem from using limited systems and finding a way to get the best out of them.

 

[gurugeorge]

There was a time when Unreal-engined games had a "look," and looked like Unreal (I dunno, it's hard to pin-point, something about the way rendering and shading were done, maybe?). And I think several developers had bad experiences trying to use Unreal for multiplayer games (off the top of my head, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes and some of those fly-by-night full-loot PvP micro-MMOs). That said, my impression from reading about game development over the years is that a lot depends (as someone said above) on how far one's game's design deviates from the "template" the game engine was based on. I seem to recall reading occasionally in post-mortems, etc., about developers having a hell of a time trying to mangle Unreal or whatever into some shape that fitted their game.

IOW, it looks like at some point, the amount of effort you have to put into customizing a game engine to suit your game starts to look like about the same amount of effort you'd've had to have put in to make one from scratch.

But it seems like those problems are becoming a thing of the past these days, and indie developers seem to have managed to wrangle unique-looking/playing games out of both Unreal and Unity. My main worry about the trend is the general idea someone else mentioned above, that making game engines generic has enabled ideological infiltration into the industry (IOW, instead of the game's design, ambience, lore, story, characters, etc., being created by the same smart, widely-read nerds who made the engine, it's now created by free-floating dangerhairs with singular obsessions). Not only is this an ideological problem, but it's also meant that games have lost some of their idiosyncratic charm. To put this in a nutshell, "Wouldn't it be cool if ..." just doesn't work if the range of what's allowably "cool" is ideologically pre-restricted (same problem as with modern movies, comedy, etc.)

There's also the point about team size leading to team clunkiness, but that goes to the larger question of how much "realism" is wanted in games (which drives team size, which drives clunkiness). But theoretically it should also work the other way too (small team uses generic engine/assets, freed up to design game).

 

[gurugeorge]

Believing more tools = better is a dangerous fallacy creeping all over the IT and DIY world. More tools = more tools. More shit to assess, more shit to learn to use, more shit to track, more shit to buy, more ways to fuck up. Creativity can actually stem from using limited systems and finding a way to get the best out of them.

Bing-fucking-go. The idea of having infinite tools for infinite contingencies is very attractive in theory, but in the real world there's a cost to every benefit.

The lesson scales up to the level of civilization itself. We've woven this comfortable shell around ourselves, but it has a big cost (in terms of the mismatch between that civilizational shell and the ancestral environment our bodies and minds were designed for and "expect"). And there's no easy answer (going full Luddite and returning to the forests on all fours is hardly the solution either).

 

[Roguey]

but in the top 101, how many were games developed at a time where such engines weren't available?

And you can add Deus Ex (unreal engine), VtMB (Source) and Age of Decadence (Torgue) to your list of games which used engines.

The infamous Descent to Undermountain from 1998 which made the mistake of using the Descent engine. The cancelled TORN made the mistake of using Lithtech.

Strife from 1996 used the Doom engine.

 

[Curratum]

UE5 - "Don't you people have i9 9900ks and 3080s?"

 

[Strange Fellow]

Physics engines haven't made RPGs better.

WRONG

 

[Humbaba]

So, what are YOUR favourite game engines?

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I think they meant..

Common mistake.

 

[Gargaune]

Bing-fucking-go.

Microsoft should use this for voice activation.

 

[Irata]

as part of an extensive new partnership with Epic Games (which they were quick to assure does not mean that the game will be an Epic Games Store-exclusive).

I bet it means that it won't be on Steam. Maybe not even Microsoft's subscription service. Assuming the PC gaming landscape doesn't change before it is released. [originally posted in the wrong thread]