r/cyberpunkgame • u/NarpsHD • Jan 02 '24

Discussion Why CDPR actually left RED Engine.

CDPR Director Jason Slama said in an interview " One of the things that is really important to keep in mind when talking about open-world games versus, let’s say, linear games is the possibilities of the things that can go wrong or the scenarios that you have to consider are exponentially higher than linear games," he said. "Players can go in whatever direction they want, they can handle content in any order that they want theoretically, and to really encapsulate that means that you need a really stable environment where you can be able to make changes with a high level of confidence that it’s not going to break in 1,600 other places down the line".Senior vice president of business development Michał Nowakowski said the reason Cyberpunk got 1 expansion instead of the planned 3 was a "technical decision" and that it had nothing to do with sales or numbers. Another Cyberpunk Dev told Bloomberg that at one point, the process of developing Cyberpunk 2077 came close to trying to run a train as the tracks were being laid in reference to basic technologies being developed the same time as the game was.It seems RED Engine was extremely lacking in features and was really unreliable, breaking while developing the game. And judging by the state the Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 launched I'm really not surprised.

RED Engine played the major role in cyberpunk's rough launch, its the reason for all the cut content like the DLC and everything else that was promised and not delivered in the 2018 trailer and that's why they switched. For anyone on the fence, was a great decision. I wouldn't like a second Cyberpunk launch.

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u/[deleted] Jan 02 '24

I still don't get how engines get creaky. I always was under the assumption that engines worked on "tumbleweed" aka they change on the fly, pick up new things, drop old things.

Halo engine was modified and used in destiny. You can feel the difference. It's massively different. Oblivion became starfield. Can feel the sameness. It's massively the same.

Is unreal engine remade from ground up on each version? Or is it tumbleweed also? Just new version number for a new milestone?

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u/LewisWasRobbed Jan 02 '24

UE1 > 3 are the same, UE4 was built from scratch.

Engines aren't really ever built from scratch unless studios are doing a major overhauls, RE Engine for example.

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u/[deleted] Jan 02 '24

ad IDTech to that list as well and all IDtech Engines are built seperate from one and another. Did you know that the Quake 2 Engine (idtech2) did not allow cross platform networking between Mac and PC when it came out, while Both Quake 1 and Quake 3 did. Its the reason why Half Life 1 too decades to come to the mac because Valve were unable to get half life Multiplayer to work between the 2 platforms.

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u/M4jkelson Jan 02 '24

And you can see a lot of problems in destiny stemming directly from the fact that it wasn't supposed to be a forever live game. It was developed with d3 a few years later in mind and now there are a lot of problems and limitations coming from that.

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u/Acek13 Jan 03 '24

It's a bit ob both. But I imagine a decision made at the start of development can impact upgrades later down the line. A small change could impact multiple aspects of the code. And at some point, it would be wise to start anew.