When Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty DLC launched, it marked the end of REDengine. The development team has been using that engine for years, and their transition to Unreal Engine 5 also meant that the studio would no longer support Cyberpunk 2077. Instead, this launch expansion was the last of the big new content for the game. Now, the focus is on developing future games through Unreal Engine 5. However, if you thought that this shift was difficult, you’d be surprised. We’re finding out that the transition and the content they learned to develop using REDengine is a bit easier to bring onto the new engine.
This news came from a PC Gamer interview with Gabe Amatangelo, the director behind Cyberpunk 2077. During their conversation, the topic of starting over completely with Unreal Engine 5, especially with the content and tech developed using REDengine. However, Gabe noted that the studio is not starting from scratch because a lot of things they built using REDengine, such as Ray Reconstruction, can be applied to new engines.
It isn’t starting from scratch. A lot of times when you build these things, like Ray Reconstruction, there are a lot of methodologies you can apply to new engines. Learnings and the strategy of setting up the architecture. And when you look at the things that Unreal does well, the things that REDengine does well—there are some similarities and some gaps, but the brilliant engineers are like ‘with all the stuff that we know you crazy creatives want to do in the future, there’s less of a delta here. Let’s strategically shift to [Unreal Engine 5]’.
Gabe Amatangelo – PC Gamer
The game director went on to say that the engineers looked through Unreal Engine 5 and found plenty of similarities and methodologies that can be carried over from REDengine. Meanwhile, there are some gaps that the team will have to navigate through. Likewise, this is not a complete one-sided trek from the team at CD Projekt Red. Instead, there are some attributes that they can bring to the table and are working with Epic to incorporate into the game engine. While we don’t know what exactly REDengine can perform better with compared to Unreal Engine 5, it’s at least reassuring that these attributes will be incorporated into the engine with the help of Epic.
Right now, we’ll just have to wait for some of the new games to come out from CD Projekt Red before we can see how the new projects are handled with Unreal Engine 5. We know a few games are in the works, such as the new installment to the beloved The Witcher franchise. Additionally, while Cyberpunk 2077 is over in terms of new content, we know the franchise will continue with a new installment.
In the meantime, if you haven’t already done so, Phantom Liberty is available on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S. This might give you another reason to step back into Night City. With that said, if you have been playing, you might have noticed some bugs. Fortunately, patch 2.01 is underway, which will help resolve some of these pesky issues.
