CDPR is eager to move on from the Red Engine, explaining why Phantom Liberty is the only Cyberpunk 2077 DLC.
Blame is too laden a word here.
TL;DR: CDPR have opted to shutter their in-house engine, Red Engine (which CP2077 was built on) in favour of a partnership with Unreal. Most of their devs have now switched to Unreal; with only those left on the upcoming CP2077 release still using Red Engine 4.
They have opted to no longer work at all on the Red Engine projects; ergo they either port CP to Unreal (an incomprehensibly large task given that Unreal doesn’t support many features that Red does, or at least not in the way Red does - not a slight on Unreal, simple reality of different engines, especially internal vs external tooling), or cease further development of CP. They opted for the latter.
A shame, though. I remember them saying there will be more DLCs. To be fair, in their first teaser they said they’ll release when it’s ready which they also failed to do.
Part of me thinks/hopes they also aren’t putting too much attention on it because they want their upcoming games to be more on the quality level of witcher 3 than CP2077. At least I hope.
Yep, that’s what I hope for as well. Witcher 3 is a masterpiece to this day. I’m curious about what the Witcher 1 remaster will look like. I recently made the original work with a controller on my Steam Deck and it feels very nostalgic.
The word ‘blame’ is such a stupid choice for this headline
As long as the move to Unreal contains no epic store exclusive agreement baked in, this is good news overall.
I guess potentially they will be able to make a Cyberpunk 2077 sequel on Unreal Engine maybe called Cyberpunk 2078: Edgerunner Boogaloo (CDPR I am available to join your team, get in touch).
I know precisely the square root of fuck all when it comes to game design but presuming they can at least map across assets as they will already have the character designs, language, city design etc all sorted so hopefully they will be starting from a lot further forward than CB2077 years ago.
Some of that is probably reusable, such as the concept material. But when it comes to assets themselves, that’s a different story. Sometimes red tape prevents migrating assets from one game onto its sequels, meaning they may need to remake a somewhat different version of the assets.