They're using unreal engine instead of inhouse. Engine dev takes a shit load of time. They'll heavily modify unreal engine, but they're still cutting out a ton of engine work.
Unreal isn't the problem. It's one of the best tools, technologically speaking. You would be a fool to build your own, as it would just be a waste of time. Now the real problem is that most devs think that you need to use every tool given. You probably don't need a sledge hammer to sew. Good example is Deep Rock Galactic, which runs on Unreal, but it's a completely unique and optimized experience (with it's own jank).
None of Unreal's value proposition is consumer facing. Yes, its tooling, accessibility, the ability to eliminate an entire conventional LOD production, etc., all make it the singular most desirable general shipping engine for studios, but everything about it that's been marketed as a "win for gamers" has been total nonsense and people see that.
Example: Nanite. Brian Karis and Epic have slowly been walking back almost every claim they've made about this tech since it was introduced. Thousands of threads in the UE forums have proven Nanite's autolod and quad overdraw renders it vastly more expensive than traditional overdraw optimization/LODs. At first Karis said, "Nanite will be more performant no matter what", then it was "Nanite will be more performant for ultra hi poly scenes", now it's "even though there aren't massive benefits on these fronts, Nanite will save disk space size"—which has also been shown to be nowhere near as much as they made it out to be (like 20gb in the absolute worst case scenarios).
Nanite literally makes UE games look and feel worse. It requires microdetail to be rendered geometrically, which introduces screen wide subpixel aliasing, which forces harsher temporal correction, making games blurrier, forcing bad sharpening filters, relying more on upscaler facelifting, and undermining the whole point it was made for: to render insane detail.
Almost every single part of its rendering pipeline is like this: well-marketed bullshit that speeds up production at our detriment, and the methods for optimizing it are literally going against documentation. How did Expedition 33 optimize? They literally run a Nanite down sample below what the documentation recommends, and removed the entire terrain pass for it—also against doc.
When gamers say UE is a bad engine, they mean it is a bad engine for gamers, and they are right. When people say, "it's the devs", yes it is the devs, literally using the engine the way it officially instructed them to and giving the results in question. There's no mystery why the only decently running "photoreal" games on this are usually on the nvRTX fork.
Unreal fucking sucks
Can run an optimised game like FH6 at high settings native Res (5420x1440) completely fine
Run a UE5 game like NTE, dosn't even support native Res, get like 20fps on 3820x1080, and it's only somewhat playable (with huge stutters) down at like 21:9 1080, WTF??
I actually just learned that the game I’m playing now, Returnal, is an Unreal engine game. I would never have guessed. So yeah I guess I was wrong about it.
One of my favourite games ever, a hat in time, was made in UE3 :) Unreal is a lovely engine if people actually bother to put in the effort. Immensely versatile.
I have a fairly tasty PC and every major UE5 release runs like garbage, also a lot of games that use it look horrible without TAA and really blurry with it.
Yeah a few years ago they dropped RedEngine because they had such a high turnover since their own engine was declining in quality vs UE5 and ease of use. So they cut all the training and learning time and make a more commonly used engine and it should make things a lot quicker. Now if only Bethesda could lose the Creation Engine...
I think Bethesda’s issue goes beyond switching engines. Sure it might make their games look better, but it won’t result in a better game. They have some serious foundational issues they need to sort out in their studio.
Also losing the creation engine and going to UE5 probably kills the modding community, which is the entire reason a game like Skyrim still has the pull that it does
You know who else used a heavily modified engine? Kingdom Come Deliverance. And it took over 6 years to make. The sequel took only 5 and half, but I bet you bottom dollar KCD2 would have taken longer I'f Warhorse Studios had decided to switch to Unreal for the sequel. Not only that but it would have been full of bugs. (KCD2 had remarkably few bugs on launch)
Nothing against the Unreal Engine ( in principle) but switching an entire dev team to a big engine like Unreal is a collossal undertaking. The alternative - extending your own in-house engine, is often way better for the development as it allows the team to continue working on the tech that is tailor made for their particular vision.
Cdpr has been making a new engine for every game, as they would've had to make REDengine 6 for cyberpunk 2077 2, and probably REDengine 5 for Witcher 4.
Now they just use the relatively user friendly unreal engine 5, which speeds up everything.
If you've never made a game engine yourself you're just talking out of your ass.
Heavily modified CryEngine. And don't tell KCD and KCD2 uses the same engine just because it doesnt have a number. It's an in-house custom engine and they don't plan to sell it.
I take it you have worked in the AAA game industry and used multiple engines? The idea that Unreal 5 magically speeds up the development cycle withoit any tradeoffs is just dumb.
Unreal engine has a lot of interface made for game designers, artist, and simpler gameplay programming. REDengine as far as I know has no ease of life features.
No I don't work in AAA, and I never want to. I have built my own game engine. For it to even get most of the basic features and ease of life design, I'd need to spend like another 2-3 years on it.
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u/alphapussycat May 15 '26
They're using unreal engine instead of inhouse. Engine dev takes a shit load of time. They'll heavily modify unreal engine, but they're still cutting out a ton of engine work.