Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 was a major success for Warhorse Studios when it released last week. If the first game is often touted by its fans as a hidden gem of sorts, this title is an unmistakable critical and commercial success. It reached a MetaCritic of 88 across the board for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. As reported by Paul Tassi for Forbes, this makes it one of the highest rated games of 2025 to date. It also reached concurrent player counts of over 200,000 players on Steam.
Warhorse’s successful iterations on its game design are only some of the reasons that Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 has been so successful. There’s no doubt that their ambitious vision for a survival open world action RPG is now better received, now that there’s a bigger audience for survival games that appreciates it, and because they were able to execute on that vision much better.
But it must also be said that Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is a technical achievement in itself. In particular, Warhorse was able to prove that CryEngine is absolutely still capable of delivering a AAA graphical experience in 2025. Of course, Warhorse had to make their own alterations to the engine to suit their purposes, but they proved that making a current generation title didn’t need ‘upgrading’ to Unreal 5.
In fact, Unreal 5 turned out to be a huge talking point for Daniel Vávra, one of Warhorse Studios’ co-founders. As reported by Windows Central, he shared quite a bit about Unreal 5 and how it was affecting his colleagues working on another European open world title, CD Projekt RED’s The Witcher 4.
Vávra said this:
“I talked with guys who are making The Witcher or from studios that are just trying to make some open-world games on Unreal because there aren’t really any open-world games on Unreal. Assassin’s Creed, everything like that, is on their own engine.”
CD Projekt just switched to Unreal. Even though, in my opinion, they had a good proprietary engine. I talked to someone whose name I obviously can’t say, and I said to him, ‘So how about Unreal?’ ‘Great, we already have pieces done, like some landscapes.’ And I said, well, what about the open world? ‘Not yet.’ When did they announce it? A year or two ago, and it still doesn’t work?”
Vávra also elaborated further on the challenges of using Unreal:
“If you wanted to make a game on Unreal from some rocks, that’s great, but it couldn’t do trees for a long time. Their nanite couldn’t generate vegetation until now. Now it can.”
“Until you look at some demo and realize that while it looks absolutely divine. Photos, just like a movie. Then you need a computer that costs two hundred grands (8000 Euro), and a maximum of four people can walk there because otherwise, even the damn computer that costs two hundred grand will not be able to run it.”
Now, as Windows Central’s Michael Hoglund explained, this interview was 11 months ago, and Vávra is likely talking about an even earlier stage in The Witcher 4‘s development. It’s clear that Vávra did not throw any criticisms CD Projekt RED’s way. Really, he shared the common opinion that Unreal 5 isn’t suitable for making open world games in particular. In fact, last year we reported on Pearl Abyss bragging about how they got their upcoming open world title, Crimson Desert, pulling off visual effects Unreal can’t, because they used their own proprietary engine Black Space. This really could be more than just a popular opinion.
With all that being said, we don’t know if we should be concerned about how well The Witcher 4 is going along. If Epic Games saw this, they will definitely want to touch base with the people at CD Projekt RED as soon as they can.
