No one said they're switching everything forever to UE5. The next Witcher game is going to be made using UE5, that is all we know. Could very well be that CDPR will be updating it's own engine and they'll come back with it for the next Cyberpunk game, who knows?
It is way too early to say they are moving on from it.
And it is never going open source.
It is way too early to say they are moving on from it.
And it is never going open source.
I doubt open source would be possible if the engine incorporates third party technologies under licence (eg for audio).
Seriously answering your question, I would say that Red Engine has no future. The postponement of the expansion of Cyberpunk 2077 to 2023 (which will bring the game's "death" during this waiting process) and the absolutely meaningless indefinition of The Witcher 3 next gen denote that the company does not see a future in a commercial sense for this graphics engine. My opinion (and of course they'll never admit it): they're going all-in on Unreal Engine 5.
Good Point! The question becomes, "Do they actually have unlicensed proprietary impropriety?"
Quite the possibility! But, I'm certain the modding community would jizz all over the opportunity to play with the engine internals. Never say never! Who would have thought back in the day that the Quake engine and Unreal engine would become what they became?
Beautiful pessimism! But that pessimism suggests that it should be open-sourced! Who wouldn't find a benefit in CDPR using both engines that way? It may be a conflict of interests, but interesting and productive either way.
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I agree with the general notion that CDPR has switched to UE5 entirely, but this has nothing to do with them not admitting it. Much rather, the new WItcher is the only new game they are working on where they are in an early enough state to communicate which engine it is going to use. While they probably already have internal plans for the next Cyberpunk, they do not say anything because this would mean announcing it.
Likewise, I also believe them that Cyberpunk 2077 was not responsible for the move to partnering with Epic. (It might have been a contributing factor though.) Here, the landscape of engine and game development just shifted and Epic is an interesting partner for CDPR as well as the other way around. Do not forget that CDPR announced a partnership, not just using UE5. Hence, they will contribute to UE5 and work on it, just as they did with the REDEngine. The only difference this time around is that more developers are using UE5 and therefore the communication will be much better compared to a small internal engine.
See EPIC vs Silicon Knights... basically they went into bankruptcy.Maybe they just want to see what works well in UE5 in order to improve REDengine.
The Epic partnership on unreal is for 15 years, renewable. CDP's own management board report on the accounts states that they have shelved RedEngine R&D on multuplayer because unreal 4 and 5 both include multiplayer functions. Beyond Cyberpunk 2077 I wouldn't expect to see future development of the engine.
Commercially, it doesn't make any sense to get nostalgic. If you have an engine that can be made to work with what you want to do and can already do many of the things you want to do better than your own engine does them, continuously reinventing the wheel to try to keep up is a waste of time and money and a fool's errand.
Part of Epic's business is literally licensing the Unreal Engine. They have dedicated teams who do nothing but the engine. CDPR had to build and maintain the Red Engine in its entirety purely to make their own games. It sounds fairly close to a no-brainer.
Commercially, it doesn't make any sense to get nostalgic. If you have an engine that can be made to work with what you want to do and can already do many of the things you want to do better than your own engine does them, continuously reinventing the wheel to try to keep up is a waste of time and money and a fool's errand.
Part of Epic's business is literally licensing the Unreal Engine. They have dedicated teams who do nothing but the engine. CDPR had to build and maintain the Red Engine in its entirety purely to make their own games. It sounds fairly close to a no-brainer.
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The real question is whether the Multiplayer support for Red Engine was built in Java as suggested in the Credits of Cyberpunk 2077. If so, I'm pretty sure I'm familiar with the problems that they had trying to keep it stable. Java Generics are FUCT UP! Once you get to a certain level of complexity the language shatters into unintelligibility. Weird side effects and phantom behavior.
This! With this partnership, both CDPR and Epic can profit from one another.
More or less, there are still certain advantages to having a custom tailored engine. That being said, the more complex it becomes the more difficult it becomes to manage...and engines are notoriously difficult.
Concerning the UE5 engine: I do hope Epic is able to fix this odd/bad scaling that is apparently still present in UE5.
Who knows, maybe CDPR will even address this issue, since it was never a problem in any of their games.
in US dollars, it appears that they wrote off $21,000 on the multiplayer functionality. However, based on the data posted on the CDPR website they've given a significant portion of development resources into the CP expansion. What's the probability that they'll remarket CP77 as another next-gen release on Unreal Engine 5? It would be a huge announcement. Also, good for both PR and sales. At the moment I'm considering the future of Edgerunners considering what's going on with current politics on Netflix. A combination of the expansion and Edgerunners will be just as big, if not bigger than the initial release.
In my opinion these chances are extremely low, given that switching the engine is a massive undertaking and as seen above in the video UE5 also has issues that would need to be fixed. No game ever has changed the engine after its release and usually a mid-development engine change adds a few years of additional development time. While working on the game before the release is like changing the engines of a plane while still on the ground, changing the engine after the release is more akin to doing it mid flight.
I could imagine a possible strategy is developing TW4 on UE5, adding a few extensions to Cyberpunk '77 and maintaining it technically (bug fixes, improvements).
Meanwhile, lessons learned from developing TW4 could be transferred to a small team slowly starting work on a sequel to Cyberpunk '77 on UE5.
Of course, it would be great for us customers if development could take place in parallel from a certain point, provided the resources are available.
I may misremember (or dreamed) that CDProject intends to work on two major titles simultaneously in the future.
Meanwhile, lessons learned from developing TW4 could be transferred to a small team slowly starting work on a sequel to Cyberpunk '77 on UE5.
Of course, it would be great for us customers if development could take place in parallel from a certain point, provided the resources are available.
I may misremember (or dreamed
) that CDProject intends to work on two major titles simultaneously in the future.
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They already do, after all CDPR is working on the next Witcher and on Cyberpunk 2077.I may misremember (or dreamed
Good point! I wouldn't put it past the company to have surprises though. Considering everything since the release of CP77 they've done a lot of things that were unexpected. Including splintering the codebase between consoles. I've been speculating about what the difficulty would be in porting all of the existing assets to the other engine and giving the game a new coat of polish. Based on what you've posted about UE5 I've been looking at the other issues that Unreal has.
Also, I have no idea how significantly different the two versions of Unreal are beyond what's hitting the media. That being said, CP77 was done in UE3 or UE4 in combination with Red Engine? Is it feasible to port everything over to UE5 by 2023?
Dont think they have been using UE at all before this tbh (perhaps for demoing or testing concepts?). It probably wont ever be ported over since its a pretty big task, im not even sure it can be done without having too redo alot of the work. REDengine is self developed as far as i know. After they used Aurora Engine for Witcher 1.
But beyond CP2077, where else will Red Engine be used? And is it enough to keep it viable?
Probably wont be used for some years depending on how UE5 works out ofc. Think the deal they struck with Epic was for 15 years of potential usage. Think they have some failsafes in the contract if it dont work out..