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New The Witcher Game in the works

SF Kosmo

Al Jazeera Special Reporter
CDPR is skating on borrowed reputation. The Witcher was buggy and got bad to middling reviews. The Witcher 2 got moderate reviews. The Witcher 3 is their only "beloved" game with universal praise.
This is just factually wrong. Both Witcher 1 and 2 got excellent reviews at the time.

Witcher 1 had a metacritic score of 86, reviewed by 30 critics -- Not one critic giving it less than 70. To call that "bad to middling" is just a bald faced lie.

Witcher 2 scored even better with an 88, with 76 reviews (70 positive, 6 mixed).

We can argue about how these games have dated (I think 2 hold up but the first not so much), but they were absolutely acclaimed games at their time of release.
 
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Airbus Jr

Banned
Not happy theyre dropping their own tech(RED) for UE5

Seems like everybody is using ue5 these days

Anyway good news lead characters will prob be Ciri ( which makes the perfect ending canon)

Or they can go for Letho
 

kraspkibble

Permabanned.
Not happy theyre dropping their own tech(RED) for UE5

Seems like everybody is using ue5 these days

Anyway good news lead characters will prob be Ciri ( which makes the perfect ending canon)

Or they can go for Letho
red engine sucks. it's mostly fine for Witcher 3 and while they enhanced it a lot for cyberpunk you can see all the problems it has.

it'd be too much work to rework the engine or make a new one from scratch. so why not use someone else's? UE5 is the perfect choice.

after the cyberpunk mess (i loved it) i can't blame them for wanting a fresh start. a witcher reboot with a new engine. it's the best thing they could do going forward. go back to the games that made them and not be held back by an old engine from over a decade ago. the cyberpunk sequel will come but they need to let that lie for now. that's probably a minimum of 10 years away. CDPR need to restore their reputation and they'll try do that over the next decade.
 

kraspkibble

Permabanned.
That's not a Bethesda game :D
Can't remember W3 being that bad in its first year.
i played witcher 3 from launch and it was mostly fine. there were bugs but nothing crazy or unsuspected for a game that size.

when skyrim came out that was bad. i remember the PS3 version was awful. i had to keep multiple save back ups cause if it went over a certain size the game would shit itself. also some of the main story was broken for a long time.

fallout 4 had terrible performance issues. it would drop to about 15-20fps at times and i was playing on PC. modding it helped a little but there was heavy frame drops and the game looked worse because it was an issue with shadows.

i wonder what starfield will be like. if it's a mess like skyrim or fallout 4 i'll be interested to see the reaction. they'll probably get a free pass as usual though.
 

Filben

Member
Save them? From what? Gamers? Lol. You show them concept art with cool music and they preorder in the millions.
On Instagram they already are all aboard the hype train although we only have two facts right now.

Gamers™ won't learn and this why they will always get away with it. CP sold so well they could do in fact the same shit again and will wipe their joy tears with all the money (only management of course).
 

Strategize

Member
That's not a Bethesda game :D
Can't remember W3 being that bad in its first year.
Well it wasn't quite Cyberpunk levels, but it was still techinically poor, esepically on console. I played it day 1 on PS4, it was very broken, yet I forced myself through it for it's reedeming qualities. What a mistake that was since when I replayed + all the DLC I had a much, much better time thanks to all the patches/QOL improvements.

So let me tell you when Cyberpunk's launch turned out to be a disaster and everyone had shocked Pikachu face, I just went "yeah, no fucking shit". Maybe if they stopped deepthroating CDPR for 1 minute, they'd have known they aren't close to what they'd built them up to be. They make overambitious games with great presentation (for an RPG), great stories, deeply flawed gameplay and a metric shitload of bugs and jankiness, the day 1 is simply a beta version.

They aren't Rockstar, Naughty Dog, From Software or Nintendo, where they have so much pedigree and history you can be pretty safe buying a game day 1 and have confindence in a quality product, and even then there's no reason to do that blindly considering how easy it is to check these days.
 
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Airbus Jr

Banned
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zkorejo

Member
Will it be a sequel or a prequel. Definitely the same universe but a new character from cat school of witchers. I'm interested but cautious. The story of geralt, the characters, the story of geralt and everything were already established in the books. Kind of worried that the story won't be at the same level as Geralt's journey.
 

kraspkibble

Permabanned.
Will it be a sequel or a prequel. Definitely the same universe but a new character from cat school of witchers. I'm interested but cautious. The story of geralt, the characters, the story of geralt and everything were already established in the books. Kind of worried that the story won't be at the same level as Geralt's journey.
it's a new saga. so could be entirely new characters made up by CDPR and set in a different time but i hope it follows from the ending of 3 where Ciri
becomes a witcher
so i guess you could say that's a sequel.

Day 1!

Graphics will be unreal!
i see what you did there
 
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rolandss

Member
So they pretty much are abandoning cyberpunk to it’s place as disappointment of the decade. One thing is sure, I won’t be getting this at launch.
 
The engine they used for Cyberpunk was completely new and it's Red Engine only by name.
Rendering and everything else are created specially for building the huge city and to support the game needs.
For Witcher series they need different engine different pipeline capable to recreate huge open fields, dense forest; caves.
Probably they did some production calculations and decide to go with UE5 instead using they home engine.
+ probably some good proposal from Epic Games side as money, tech etc.
 

Flabagast

Member
The engine they used for Cyberpunk was completely new and it's Red Engine only by name.
Rendering and everything else are created specially for building the huge city and to support the game needs.
For Witcher series they need different engine different pipeline capable to recreate huge open fields, dense forest; caves.
Probably they did some production calculations and decide to go with UE5 instead using they home engine.
+ probably some good proposal from Epic Games side as money, tech etc.
Yes but what about the sequel to Cyberpunk ? Will they stick to UE5 or go back to Red Engine and then parallelize ?

Apparently they are fully switching to UE5 for all their IPs, but it's a shame. For Cyberpunk like you said they nearly built a complete engine from scratch. Some things do not work but some do work really really well, their techs guys must be bitter to have all this work go to waste.
 

Sentenza

Member
Very curious that they are going with UE5.
I guess Red Engine was causing them too much trouble.
It's easy to guess that especially with their HEAVY turn over (the studios have been a revolving door since The Witcher 1) they finally decided that having to train new developers for months on their proprietary engine (only to see them leave and then repeat the process) wasn't worth the effort.
They are going with what at this point is basically the industry standard because you can have students fresh out of college that can already be familiar with it.
 

mitchman

Gold Member
Yes but what about the sequel to Cyberpunk ? Will they stick to UE5 or go back to Red Engine and then parallelize ?

Apparently they are fully switching to UE5 for all their IPs, but it's a shame. For Cyberpunk like you said they nearly built a complete engine from scratch. Some things do not work but some do work really really well, their techs guys must be bitter to have all this work go to waste.
By dropping their own engine, they can free up 100-200 (guesstimate) developers that would otherwise work on tools and the engine, for other tasks. There's a significant resource save here, and maintaining an own engine is becoming less and less feasable as the engine must support more and more advanced technologies.
 

Hezekiah

Banned
Yes but what about the sequel to Cyberpunk ? Will they stick to UE5 or go back to Red Engine and then parallelize ?

Apparently they are fully switching to UE5 for all their IPs, but it's a shame. For Cyberpunk like you said they nearly built a complete engine from scratch. Some things do not work but some do work really really well, their techs guys must be bitter to have all this work go to waste.
Wait what, has there been confirmation of a Cyberpunk sequel?
 

SF Kosmo

Al Jazeera Special Reporter
That's not a Bethesda game :D
Can't remember W3 being that bad in its first year.
Every CDPR game gets massive improvements in post release patches, and Witcher 3 was no exception.

CP2077 fucked their reputation mostly because the last gen console ports were borderline non functional. The PC version was a little buggy and had some features scaled back from earlier but par for the course for CDPR. If it was a OC only release or launched only on next gen I doubt the conversation would have been so negative.
 

SF Kosmo

Al Jazeera Special Reporter
IDK if changing REDengine to UE5 was a good ideia.
I think it's a really smart idea. REDengine developed a lot of jank over the course of Cyberpunk's development. Look how much time they've had to throw at bug fixing. To really fix it, they'd need to push everything back and rebuild REDengine from the ground up.

They may actually want to do that, but the lesson learned here is not to develop an engine and a game at the same time. So even if they wanted to salvage REDengine, developing their next game on something else gives them time to do that.

It's also a lot more industry standard, and makes it easier to outsource to support studios if they need extra resources and that kind of thing.
 

VFXVeteran

Banned
At this point, Epic is so far ahead of other studio's graphics engines it's just a no-brainer to go with a company that has the man-power and the staff and resources to be the leading graphics engine. I doubt any other studio comes up with tech similar to Nanite for awhile (i.e. not even this generation).
 

SF Kosmo

Al Jazeera Special Reporter
I wonder if it's going to be a prequel game or will it follow ciri? Assuming
Geralt story is done after Witcher 3?
Based on the teaser image, probably set after Geralt's story and probably not to do with Ciri. Could possibly be set during the Geralt trilogy, but not before, because School of the Lynx didn't exist then.
At this point, Epic is so far ahead of other studio's graphics engines it's just a no-brainer to go with a company that has the man-power and the staff and resources to be the leading graphics engine. I doubt any other studio comes up with tech similar to Nanite for awhile (i.e. not even this generation).
I wouldn't assume every game using UE5 is gonna use nanite, I mean storage space alone is going to be a limitation when we talk about games of this scale.
 
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Twinblade

Member
Based on the teaser image, probably set after Geralt's story and probably not to do with Ciri. Could possibly be set during the Geralt trilogy, but not before, because School of the Lynx didn't exist then.

I wouldn't assume every game using UE5 is gonna use nanite, I mean storage space alone is going to be a limitation when we talk about games of this scale.

How many witchers are they?
 

Rest

All these years later I still chuckle at what a fucking moron that guy is.
Also in your argument you disprove yourself by saying 'give them shit twice in a row' Ala Witcher 1 and 2 according to you.
Nah dude. Witcher 2 was an improvement over the first. It was a mediocre game.
 

Croatoan

They/Them A-10 Warthog
Nanite and Lumen are going to own the engine wars. There is little reason to develop your own stuff unless you are confident you can outdo epic or need something super specific.
 

Fake

Member
I think it's a really smart idea. REDengine developed a lot of jank over the course of Cyberpunk's development. Look how much time they've had to throw at bug fixing. To really fix it, they'd need to push everything back and rebuild REDengine from the ground up.

They may actually want to do that, but the lesson learned here is not to develop an engine and a game at the same time. So even if they wanted to salvage REDengine, developing their next game on something else gives them time to do that.

It's also a lot more industry standard, and makes it easier to outsource to support studios if they need extra resources and that kind of thing.

Two things you need to understand:
First REDengine was already an engine they are already familiar with the dev team, regardless the Cyberpunk fiasco with I believe was their obssession with support PS4/Base Xbox was their ruin.
Two the UE5 is a very new 'model' engine with loads of problems with require time to master or even patch out. Shadow Warrior 3 was a good example of that.

John from DF talk about that.


 

Rest

All these years later I still chuckle at what a fucking moron that guy is.
This is just factually wrong. Both Witcher 1 and 2 got excellent reviews at the time.

Witcher 1 had a metacritic score of 86, reviewed by 30 critics -- Not one critic giving it less than 70. To call that "bad to middling" is just a bald faced lie.

Witcher 2 scored even better with an 88, with 76 reviews (70 positive, 6 mixed).

We can argue about how these games have dated (I think 2 hold up but the first not so much), but they were absolutely acclaimed games at their time of release.
Ah yes, the infallible metacritic.

Graphics: Environments and combat animations look excellent, but it's a pity that so many character models are recycled

Sound: You will notice music and voices coming out of your speaker, but they won't make much of an impression beyond that

Playability: Letting the player choose between two non-broken camera modes is a good idea, and the combat is fluid and fun

Entertainment: Ultimately follows the "do some quests, progress to the next area" formula, but has enough engaging content to feel fresh

Is this high praise? That's a 8.0 score from Game Informer. The description seems pretty mediocre, yet the score number would imply that it's a great game. Maybe you're forgetting about the four point scale.
 

kikkis

Member
Two things you need to understand:
First REDengine was already an engine they are already familiar with the dev team, regardless the Cyberpunk fiasco with I believe was their obssession with support PS4/Base Xbox was their ruin.
Two the UE5 is a very new 'model' engine with loads of problems with require time to master or even patch out. Shadow Warrior 3 was a good example of that.

John from DF talk about that.



In that same thread ex-CDPR project engine programmer says how engine was rebooted everytime there was new game, and while intention was good their crunch culture made new versions ultimately unmaintainable.
 

Dibils2k

Member
people think devs moving to unreal engine 5 is amazing cause of the potential, but the harsh truth is that they do it because it is so easily scalable, they wanna have Witcher 4 on switch

so i dont expect huge revolutions in game design or physics
 

Braag

Member
I wonder if it's going to be a prequel game or will it follow ciri? Assuming
Geralt story is done after Witcher 3?
It wouldn't surprise me if it took place in the future, but you can create your own witcher, perhaps they change it so there's a way to make female witchers too.
Or they just go with Ciri. They could even make it so you don't play as a witcher at all.
The game is still at least 5 years away so could be anything really.
 

Ristifer

Member
Sounds like a desperate attempt to save thier reputation. This time I will wait a while before buying the game.
Come on now. They don't just announce a game to save their reputation. Maybe if they had announced this in the middle of the Cyberpunk disaster instead of now, then I may see some distraction tactics being played. But this seems like a natural announcement.
 
This is just factually wrong. Both Witcher 1 and 2 got excellent reviews at the time.

Witcher 1 had a metacritic score of 86, reviewed by 30 critics -- Not one critic giving it less than 70. To call that "bad to middling" is just a bald faced lie.

Witcher 2 scored even better with an 88, with 76 reviews (70 positive, 6 mixed).

We can argue about how these games have dated (I think 2 hold up but the first not so much), but they were absolutely acclaimed games at their time of release.
Witcher 1 and 2 are excellent games (despite 1 having bad combat). Witcher 3 has a lot of open world bloat. It's still a great game, but definitely overrated.
 

SF Kosmo

Al Jazeera Special Reporter
Witcher 1 and 2 are excellent games (despite 1 having bad combat). Witcher 3 has a lot of open world bloat. It's still a great game, but definitely overrated.
Witcher 2 is waaaay underrated in the public conversation. A lot of people who never played the first two like to dismiss them because they didn't sell the sort of numbers as the third, but Witcher 2 was and is a really great game. Witcher 1 hasn't dated very well (not just the combat, but very linear and the story feels like one act of a larger story), but I did like it at the time.
 

SF Kosmo

Al Jazeera Special Reporter
Ah yes, the infallible metacritic.
Literally a compilation of review scores adjusted relative to averages demonstrating objectively that the game you described as having "bad reviews" was higher scored by reviewers than most games.
Is this high praise?
It sure as shit isn't "bad reviews" anyway. So I guess you were wrong.

That's a 8.0 score from Game Informer. The description seems pretty mediocre, yet the score number would imply that it's a great game.
The summary lists pros and cons, like almost any review would. The reviewer clearly liked the game. Just admit you were wrong, those games reviewed well above average no matter how you want to nitpick.
 
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Rest

All these years later I still chuckle at what a fucking moron that guy is.
It sure as shit isn't "bad reviews" anyway. So I guess you were wrong.
Bad to middling. You don't just get to ignore information in other people's statements because it doesn't fit your argument.
 
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