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[Draugoth]

Cyberpunk 2077's lead quest designer Pawel Sasko has shared a few thoughts on the next Cyberpunk game, the mysterious "Orion" project. It's at a very early stage, with a core team that currently includes Cyberpunk 2077 game director Gabriel Amatangelo, narrative director Igor Sarinski and Sarah Gruemmer, expert quest designer, who worked on the storyline for Judy Alvarez in the previous game. They've all moved or are in the process of moving from Poland to Boston in the USA, where CD Projekt have opened a new office. One of the major challenges, right now, is getting to grips with Epic's Unreal Engine.

Orion runs on Unreal Engine, where its predecessor ran on CD Projekt's in-house RED Engine.

We've been working for quite some time already at this point on Unreal

Sasko observed, in a wide-ranging interview with The Neon Arcade.

There's a lot of work to be done when it comes to the toolset specifically and so on, because there are so many I would say specific things that our RED engine was tailored for.

"So of course, we need to make sure that all of that is built properly, so that we can do the games exactly the way we we want to," he said. "And you know, the work is ongoing here." He commented that "the advantages of Unreal are probably quite apparent", but it's far too early to go into details.

Learning how to develop an Unreal Engine game has also meant learning how to work with Unreal's publisher, Epic Games:

"Working together with Epic is a completely new thing for us, it's a challenge for one thing but also it's an honour. It's a huge studio - they have an incredible amount of engineers, very seasoned engineers. So it's something that we can also learn from. I don't understand the challenge as a difficulty, but more as an opportunity - I see so much space to actually do something awesome, so I'm actually really looking forward to that, but there's lot of work to be done on that front."

 

[Krappadizzle]

 

[IlGialloMondadori]

Goddamn it. I was worried about this move.

 

[Ronin_7]

This game will have severe crunch, book it.

 

[StereoVsn]

I still dont understand why they decided to jump onto Unreal 5 bandwagon.

They had a pretty good engine, built up their pipeline and assets, built Night City, etc…

And the engine they have is very scalable and quite performant. And they should have been able to roll the next game out quicker. Just a strange decision.

 

[damidu]

translation "buy on release date + 3 years"

 

[amigastar]

Maybe this UE5 game will actually look good.

 

[Gaiff]

Sad to see so many in-house engines getting replaced by UE.

 

[Roni]

Everyone and their mothers knew this would happen. Panic move by the leadership to stanch backlash from investors is gonna sodomize the entire development team.

 

[TheUsual]

I still dont understand why they decided to jump onto Unreal 5 bandwagon.

They had a pretty good engine, built up their pipeline and assets, built Night City, etc…

And the engine they have is very scalable and quite performant. And they should have been able to roll the next game out quicker. Just a strange decision.

Wonder if it's a talent finding issue. They may be having trouble bringing new employees up to speed on their tools and gambling with Unreals larger base of developers.

 

[Gaiff]

I still dont understand why they decided to jump onto Unreal 5 bandwagon.

They had a pretty good engine, built up their pipeline and assets, built Night City, etc…

And the engine they have is very scalable and quite performant. And they should have been able to roll the next game out quicker. Just a strange decision.

UE5 is a widely popular engine with tons of public documentation. When recruiting staff, them having UE4/5 experience is damn near mandatory. CDPR is now a worldwide studio with teams across the globe and maintaining an in-house engine is not only prohibitively expensive, but with all the contract work and temporary workers as well as those who just leave, training everyone to use their own engine simply isn't very viable anymore.

I've seen many devs complain about UE4/5 being garbage and not flexible but it's widespread and damn near everyone has some experience with it.

 

[geary]

Wonder if it's a talent finding issue. They may be having trouble bringing new employees up to speed on their tools and gambling with Unreals larger base of developers.

This + the cost to keep the engine up to date

 

[ahtlas7]

Delays

 

[zeroluck]

Looking forward to another disaster, unless the sequel will have same or worse city simulation.

 

[Chuck Berry]

How about don't tell us shit like that

 

[proandrad]

They finally got their own engine at a good place, then some genius executive decides they should change to UE5.

 

[GHG]

Considering how most other UE5 games have released in terms of performance, this is going to be a disaster.

Such a shame as well considering they seemed to have just got to grips with the redengine in terms of how they wanted it to be for Cyberpunk.

 

[SEGAvangelist]

Hmm... I wonder if there is an engine they are familiar with that they already created an amazing game on that they could use...

 

[Beer Baelly]

How about don't tell us shit like that

 

[Dazraell]

Of course it's a challenge as after spending over a decade on their internal engine, moving to new one will always be challenging and feel like going into unknown territory

But I think it's a good choice as it not only will allow them to hire more talent, but also evolve their technology with much ease as a lot of things they originally had to code or licence will be just a part of the package included in Epic's tools

 

[StereoVsn]

This + the cost to keep the engine up to date

We have yet to see anyone except for Epic do a decent job with UE5. I have a hard time to believe performance will be anywhere as flexible with UE5 vs Red Engine. You can run Cyberpunk from Steam Deck to High End rig and look good on all of them (compared to the hardware).

They will also have to heavily mod UE5 to make it work for them so wonder if that effort, optimization issues and lmore are going to be worth it.

Yeah, I do understand the talent issue, it hard to get folks properly trained up in a reasonable amount of time.

However, now they will take longer to release and they costs a lot of money too.

 

[StereoVsn]

Of course it's a challenge as after spending over a decade on their internal engine, moving to new one will always be challenging and feel like going into unknown territory

But I think it's a good choice as it not only will allow them to hire more talent, but also evolve their technology with much ease as a lot of things they originally had to code or licence will be just a part of the package included in Epic's tools

I am highly skeptical this will turn out to be a smooth road. Hell, financial impact for extra optimization time in UE5, modifying the engine, extra years of time for sequel release will likely outweigh the cost for keeping the engine more updated.

That said, I guess we shall see sometimes around 2030 .

 

[Chuck Berry]

Considering how most other UE5 games have released in terms of performance, this is going to be a disaster.

Such a shame as well considering they seemed to have just got to grips with the redengine in terms of how they wanted it to be for Cyberpunk.

Maybe they can get Teyon to help out. They're local

Have you seen RoboCop?

 

[Dazraell]

I am highly skeptical this will turn out to be a smooth road. Hell, financial impact for extra optimization time in UE5, modifying the engine, extra years of time for sequel release will likely outweigh the cost for keeping the engine more updated.

That said, I guess we shall see sometimes around 2030 .

I think it may be earlier, I feel The Witcher 4 may even launch this generation as after Cyberpunk they're apparently having a mandate for having builds fully playable on all of the target platforms, not only PC

 

[Braag]

Of course it's a challenge as after spending over a decade on their internal engine, moving to new one will always be challenging and feel like going into unknown territory

But I think it's a good choice as it not only will allow them to hire more talent, but also evolve their technology with much ease as a lot of things they originally had to code or licence will be just a part of the package included in Epic's tools

Considering that they are planning to expand so they can develop 2 massive games simultaneously, it makes sense to go with a well known engine which will make recruitment easier.

 

[StereoVsn]

I think it may be earlier, I feel The Witcher 4 may even launch this generation as after Cyberpunk they're apparently having a mandate for having builds fully playable on all of the target platforms, not only PC

Witcher 4 is UE5 as well. It will take then a while to port their tools, customize UE5, add their middleware software, configure their content pipeline, etc…

Probably at least 3-4 more years for W4 if not longer. More than that for Cyberpunk. So yeah, it’s going to be a while.

I mean I am sure CDPR had very good reasons to dump Red Engine, but I feel they have done it too fast and could have gotten W4 and Cyberpunk 2 out on Red Engine still.

 

[Flutta]

Worst decision by CDPR. Game development will now have new issues to deal with, more resources and time wasted on a new engine none of them have any expertise in. Bone headed decision by whoever.

 

[GHG]

Maybe they can get Teyon to help out. They're local

Have you seen RoboCop?

This is a good point. Robocop seems to perform well, although it's not open world is it (I'm yet to play it)?

I'm still busy with so many other games at the moment that I don't have time/room for it at the moment. Definitely one for early next year though, it looks great.

 

[Chuck Berry]

This is a good point. Robocop seems to perform well, although it's not open world is it (I'm yet to play it)?

I'm still busy with so many other games at the moment that I don't have time/room for it at the moment. Definitely one for early next year though, it looks great.

Semi open. Think something close to Deus Ex but a little smaller. Very tightly put together though.

 

[Luipadre]

 

[Loomy]

This'll be a good test of how many people actually read linked articles lol

 

[T4keD0wN]

Good, time to go back to their superior engine that doesnt stutter, uses 2+ cores, has capabilities for modding support and runs amazingly.

 

[Dazraell]

Considering that they are planning to expand so they can develop 2 massive games simultaneously, it makes sense to go with a well known engine which will make recruitment easier.

Fun fact, it'll be the third time CD Projekt tried to handle multiple projects simultaneously. Past two... well, didn't end well for them. So I assume changing engine is one of the reasons why. I guess it make sense as Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk required implementing different things and their tech team weren't able to commit to both games at a same time. Unreal is more flexible on that end, so this probably solves this issue

A first time was after The Witcher 1, they were working on Enhnanced Edition patch for Witcher 1, Witcher 2 and Red Engine, outsourced two expansions for Witcher 1 and a console port and also bought a company which was developing an FPS which they wanted to retool into Half-Life like game and branch out their portfolio. Considering only the first three projects were released, you can guess how this went for them

The other time is when they tried to work on Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk separately. I think they took lessons from these past mistakes and are building a team that won't be struggling as much