The Witcher The Witcher 4 - A New Saga Begins

[gerey]

I guess there are other metrics for success other than cash money, but they don't really matter, do they? Such is the age of decline we live in.

Said success came about by cashing in all the goodwill and positive PR they had cultivated over the years, likely spending massive amounts of money on the hype machine and leveraging all the connections they had in the industry.

2077 burned a lot of bridges for them, chiefly MS and Sony that likely didn't appreciate getting played for fools after they trusted CDPR at their word. Also, every time someone tires to hype up Witcher 4 there's going to be a bunch of people in the comments saying "Remember Cyberpunk 2077 tho?".

If you want a perfect example of where this kind of behavior eventually gets you, look at BioWare.

Maybe Witcher 4 is successful and makes them money, but it will certainly make less money than Cyberpunk 2077, will enrage more fans, disappoint more consumers and leave partners in the industry cold. The game after that will then result in even more diminish returns, and so on and so forth until they shit out their version of Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem. As a point of comparison, Cyberpunk 2077 was CDPR's Mass Effect 3, the last hurrah before the inevitable decline.

 

[Arbiter]

Guessing the guys coding RedEngine bailed after (during?) Cyberpunk and there's nobody left with enough coding chops to bring it forward. Not a surprising move given Cyberpunk's technical problems but those Epic royalties will eat into their profits, probably still worth the trade off vs sinking more hours into what is a a presumably rudderless engine now though.

Unreal Engine, being a generic game engine probably won't provide open world features, city simulation (traffic, police AI), driving, etc. All those features need to be bolted on by CDPR developers who can easily botch them.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I have a feeling that CDPR wants to heavily downsize and this is part of it, hope I'm right.

 

[tritosine2k]

Guessing the guys coding RedEngine bailed after (during?) Cyberpunk and there's nobody left with enough coding chops to bring it forward. Not a surprising move given Cyberpunk's technical problems but those Epic royalties will eat into their profits, probably still worth the trade off vs sinking more hours into what is a a presumably rudderless engine now though.

Unreal Engine, being a generic game engine probably won't provide open world features, city simulation (traffic, police AI), driving, etc. All those features need to be bolted on by CDPR developers who can easily botch them.

https://www.gamesradar.com/matrix-awakens-traffic-jam/
they did more of that in 1 year than cdpr did in 5+(?).

Problem is all this stuff adds up and once you forego framerate you will inevitably forgo gameplay elements until it's some sad soup with motion blur accounting for controller turning speeds and such.

 

[Maxie]

Purchase CDPR games, buy them in pre-order, buy them in Collector's, buy several copies, buy digital on every possible plaform, gift them to your friends and family, convince people online to buy them, shill for them using a bot farm, pay off reviewers to give them GOTY, pre-order all the DLCs, buy the GOTY edition as well, tell others to buy GOTY, spread the word online to make others buy GOTY, buy t-shirts and other merchandise, buy plushies, cosplay game characters, send CDPR congratulatory letters, visit Poland for a tour, visit often, stay long and spend a lot of money, name your children Geralt and Cirilla

 

[covr]

I laugh at you, sad and lonely people. You shit on the game you know literally nothing about.

 

[gerey]

I laugh at you, sad and lonely people. You shit on the game you know literally nothing about.

I bet you're the kind of guy that doesn't cross the street when he sees a group of black youths coming your way.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I laugh at you, sad and lonely people. You shit on the game you know literally nothing about.

 

[tritosine2k]

I laugh at you, sad and lonely people. You shit on the game you know literally nothing about.

30fps on UE5 is a given.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

If CDPR leadership had any sense, they would have started development on such an Elder Scrolls-like Witcher IV as soon as the trainwreck of Cyberpunk 2077 was made available to the public, intending to pre-empt The Elder Scrolls VI, which is still entirely possible.

In before the revelation that the reason for no DLC and slow progress in patching is that CDPR surreptitiously shifted most of their personnel to development of an Open World RPG in the Witcher setting that will release in 2024 well before Bethesda completes the Elder Scrolls VI.

Called it!

I wonder if CDPR really did start working on The Witcher IV right after the release of Cyberpunk 2077.

 

[Arbiter]

Guessing the guys coding RedEngine bailed after (during?) Cyberpunk and there's nobody left with enough coding chops to bring it forward. Not a surprising move given Cyberpunk's technical problems but those Epic royalties will eat into their profits, probably still worth the trade off vs sinking more hours into what is a a presumably rudderless engine now though.

Unreal Engine, being a generic game engine probably won't provide open world features, city simulation (traffic, police AI), driving, etc. All those features need to be bolted on by CDPR developers who can easily botch them.

https://www.gamesradar.com/matrix-awakens-traffic-jam/
they did more of that in 1 year than cdpr did in 5+(?).

Problem is all this stuff adds up and once you forego framerate you will inevitably forgo gameplay elements until it's some sad soup with motion blur accounting for controller turning speeds and such.

They likely have much better developers than CDP. Unreal Engine certainly does not provide that out of the box.

 

[Moaning_Clock]

Was wondering today why my stock portfolio made a small jump.

 

[tritosine2k]

Guessing the guys coding RedEngine bailed after (during?) Cyberpunk and there's nobody left with enough coding chops to bring it forward. Not a surprising move given Cyberpunk's technical problems but those Epic royalties will eat into their profits, probably still worth the trade off vs sinking more hours into what is a a presumably rudderless engine now though.

Unreal Engine, being a generic game engine probably won't provide open world features, city simulation (traffic, police AI), driving, etc. All those features need to be bolted on by CDPR developers who can easily botch them.

https://www.gamesradar.com/matrix-awakens-traffic-jam/
they did more of that in 1 year than cdpr did in 5+(?).

Problem is all this stuff adds up and once you forego framerate you will inevitably forgo gameplay elements until it's some sad soup with motion blur accounting for controller turning speeds and such.

They likely have much better developers than CDP. Unreal Engine certainly does not provide that out of the box.

It will be released like their previous tech demos. They are courting hollywood big time positioning unreal as "virtual production" panacea and the producers eat it up.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

 

[Tyranicon]

I guess there are other metrics for success other than cash money, but they don't really matter, do they? Such is the age of decline we live in.

Said success came about by cashing in all the goodwill and positive PR they had cultivated over the years, likely spending massive amounts of money on the hype machine and leveraging all the connections they had in the industry.

2077 burned a lot of bridges for them, chiefly MS and Sony that likely didn't appreciate getting played for fools after they trusted CDPR at their word. Also, every time someone tires to hype up Witcher 4 there's going to be a bunch of people in the comments saying "Remember Cyberpunk 2077 tho?".

If you want a perfect example of where this kind of behavior eventually gets you, look at BioWare.

Maybe Witcher 4 is successful and makes them money, but it will certainly make less money than Cyberpunk 2077, will enrage more fans, disappoint more consumers and leave partners in the industry cold. The game after that will then result in even more diminish returns, and so on and so forth until they shit out their version of Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem. As a point of comparison, Cyberpunk 2077 was CDPR's Mass Effect 3, the last hurrah before the inevitable decline.

I think I'm being overly cynical, but as a reminder, both Anthem and Andromeda sold 5 million copies each, not counting other methods of monetization. BioWare has also produced a number of games before Anthem that were subpar, going all the way back to perhaps Dragon Age 2, so their decline was sustained.

If I had to guess, CP2077's impact on Witcher 4 will be significant, but not as big as most people would think. Especially if the game looks nice and receives the same amount of marketing. Probably less pre-orders, but Cyberpunk's pre-orders were insane anyways.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I think I'm being overly cynical, but as a reminder, both Anthem and Andromeda sold 5 million copies each, not counting other methods of monetization. BioWare has also produced a number of games before Anthem that were subpar, going all the way back to perhaps Dragon Age 2, so their decline was sustained.

Andromeda was never a sales failure, Bioware's kneejerk overreaction was a terrible move.

 

[gerey]

both Anthem and Andromeda sold 5 million copies each

That's all well and good, but again, look where BioWare is now. Did those sales of Anthem and Andromeda stop their decline? No, in fact they accelerated brain drain and poisoned the well on the last worthwhile IP BioWare had in their portfolio. Now nobody, not even EA, gives a shit about Dragon Age 4, nobody even bothers hyping the project up, and BioWare have been silent as a tomb on its development.

And let me remind you that when BioWare released Mass Effect 1 some people were predicting that, if handled correctly, it could have been the new Star Wars.

If I had to guess, CP2077's impact on Witcher 4 will be significant, but not as big as most people would think. Especially if the game looks nice and receives the same amount of marketing. Probably less pre-orders, but Cyberpunk's pre-orders were insane anyways.

Oh, the game will sell, but CDPR's shot at the big leagues is gone, they'll never get such a chance again.

And you have to take into account that most of the talent that made them famous in the first place is gone, most of the senior and experienced developers are gone, and they're now staffed with the kind of leftist cockroaches that erode away at company morale, chase out talent through ideological witch hunts and are more concerned with shoving politics into the product than making a viable game.

So the chance of Witcher 4 being another clusterfuck are high, they lack the creative muscle to deliver on expectation and will alienate a lot of people with woke politics. All of this combined means that the game will sell less, and then they'll have less capital to invest into the next project, which means even less talented people willing to work for them, lower production values, more bugs, less features - and on and on until they hit rock bottom.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Care to elaboarate since I haven't been keeping up with the CDPR mess?

Some folks I know are running a prominent event agency in Poland, among other things they had a contract with CDP to organise Witcher-themed events (larps mostly). The stupid pandemic hit them very hard and they were very happy to be about to get back on their feet with a bunch of events they had scheduled for this year.

But then last month a minor shitstorm happened in potato internet when it turned out that a person working for this company also works for a Very Controversial (tm) right-wing legal firm that is more or less literally hitler in the public view, which sparked a witch hunt with the obvious intent of cancelling. The thing eventually reached CDP because one retard or another emailed them about it. CDP dropped the contract with the agency immediately, which in effect forced them to shut down, sending what was their livelihood and the result of a very long time of very hard work completely down the drain.

CDP can go ahead and rot for all I care.

 

[thesecret1]

I mean, nothing really says they can't make more Witcher games as long as they don't milk Geralt's story after saying it's concluded. There's that new singleplayer Gwent game in development as well. Real baffling part is going from their own engine to UE. Did Epic straight up pay them to make the switch or something?

They probably felt it takes too much resources to further develop it – my guess would be that the code base was too much of a mess (as often happens with such things).

Unreal's a pretty good engine, so it makes sense they picked it – its biggest flaw is dogshit documentation (as in there often isn't any, especially for UE5, which is currently still in early access) and a lot of the philosophy behind the things it does (such as networking, to name an example) requires getting used to. It's universal enough to make pretty much any game in, though, and is pretty quick to develop in.

As far as big alternatives go, there's pretty much only Unity (CryEngine is terrible to work with from what I hear, and nobody really uses anything else for big projects like this), but Unity is currently lagging a bit behind Unreal at the moment, and has its own bag of problems that go with it.

 

[Maxie]

Care to elaboarate since I haven't been keeping up with the CDPR mess?

Some folks I know are running a prominent event agency in Poland, among other things they had a contract with CDP to organise Witcher-themed events (larps mostly). The stupid pandemic hit them very hard and they were very happy to be about to get back on their feet with a bunch of events they had scheduled for this year.

But then last month a minor shitstorm happened in potato internet when it turned out that a person working for this company also works for a Very Controversial (tm) right-wing legal firm that is more or less literally hitler in the public view, which sparked a witch hunt with the obvious intent of cancelling. The thing eventually reached CDP because one retard or another emailed them about it. CDP dropped the contract with the agency immediately, which in effect forced them to shut down, sending what was their livelihood and the result of a very long time of very hard work completely down the drain.

CDP can go ahead and rot for all I care.

find better friends no decent person is employed at the same place as ordo iuris cultists

 

[Vincente]

 

[Kem0sabe]

Would be hilarious if it ended up exclusive to epic and not on gog.

 

[J1M]

Announcing another RPG years in advance? Old habits die hard I guess.

I wonder what happens to the RED engine post-Witcher 4. They must have dropped a ton of resources into it when making Cyberpunk. Imagine those developers having to re-implement all that functionality again.

That's what they already did. Name an engine feature from RED not already in Unreal.

 

[RepHope]

Dunno why you guys keep acting like they’re going back to Witcher because Cyberpunk failed. They were always going back to Witcher, they said as much years ago. Even if Cyberpunk had been a major hit their next game still would’ve been Witcher. All the major studios rotate releases. Rockstar does GTA and then RDR, Bethesda did ES and FO and now are doing Starfield, BioWare rotated between ME and DA, and so on and so forth.

Kek I bet that means it will be Epic and GOG, notice how they don’t say it will be on Steam

 

[rusty_shackleford]

CDPR already learned their lesson about not releasing games on Steam with Thronebreaker.