Cyberpunk 2077’s lead quest designer Pawel Sasko has recently highlighted some of the difficulties of switching from REDengine to Unreal Engine 5 for the development of the sequel. Now that the Cyberpunk 2077 Update 2.0 is out, a team of CD Projekt Red developers are working hard on the sequel, and learning how to deal with Unreal Engine 5 is an important first step.

Project Orion was announced back in 2022 as the sequel to Cyberpunk 2077. The game is set to “explore the full potential” of the Cyberpunk 2077 universe, and it’s in the early stages of development right now.

During a recent interview with The Neon Arcade, Pawel Sasko talked about some of the difficulties of this new project, and switching from Cyberpunk 2077's REDengine to Unreal Engine 5 seems to be one of the trickiest challenges. According to the developer, “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, the devs need to learn the ropes to build the game the way they want. However, the quest designer also confirmed that there are some advantages of using Unreal Engine 5, so these initial efforts may be rewarded in the future. Aside from that, using Unreal Engine 5 also means working together with Epic Games, the engine’s publisher. This may be a new thing for the CDPR devs, but Sasko hinted that at least it’s not a difficult one, as he only had good things to say about Epic’s team.

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.

Another aspect that was highlighted by Sasko during the interview was regarding the team’s composition. The dev stated that knowing a team well, including their qualities and weaknesses, is a very understated element of game design. So, retaining the core team of Cyberpunk 2077 is making development easier. Hopefully it will help the sequel to be among the best cyberpunk games when it’s finally released. At the moment, though, the team is quite small, as having a clear and unified vision during pre-production is vital for the project’s success.

Right now, not much is known about Cyberpunk 2077’s sequel, but there are already some hints that it may be very different from its predecessor. For instance, Pawel Sasko has recently confirmed during an investor’s meeting that the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel hasn't decided on a first- or third-person perspective yet.

Posted: Nov 17, 2023 2:26 pm
Related Forum: Gaming Discussion

Source: https://gamerant.com/cyberpunk-2077-sequel-unreal-engine-5/