CD Projekt Red's Project Orion Adopts Unreal Engine 5
The Polish studio CD Projekt Red has made a crucial decision for the future of its franchise: it will stop using its REDengine and build the next installment of Cyberpunk 2077 with Unreal Engine 5. This strategic shift seeks to leverage the robust ecosystem of tools and technical support offered by Epic Games. 🎮
A Radical Change in Production
Migrating to an external engine profoundly changes how the team produces the game. It affects every stage, from modeling world elements to calculating how light interacts with them. The main goal is twofold: to design urban environments with unprecedented complexity and significantly reduce the time invested in developing the base technology, allowing more resources to be focused on content and gameplay.
Key advantages of the new engine:- Access to a unified ecosystem of widely adopted development tools.
- Ability to create architectures and landscapes with an overwhelming level of geometric detail thanks to Nanite.
- Manage global illumination dynamically and realistically with the Lumen system.
Some developers comment, half-jokingly, on the relief of not having to maintain their own engine, although now they have to master all of Unreal's keyboard shortcuts.
Night City Takes a Visual Leap
The vision for Project Orion is to expand the essence of Night City. It aims to take its overwhelming density and characteristic verticality to a new limit. To achieve this, the team relies on fully exploiting UE5's capabilities. The main rendering mode is expected to use Path Tracing, a technical evolution of the first game's Overdrive mode, to achieve a light and shadow simulation with superior physical precision. ✨
Tools that reorganize the workflow:- JIRA and Confluence are retained to organize tasks and document the project.
- Perforce is integrated for version control of the engine code and all digital assets.
- In artistic creation, Blender is consolidated as a flexible alternative for modeling, complementing or replacing other software.
A Future Built on New Foundations
This change represents more than a simple technical update; it is a fundamental restructuring of how CD Projekt Red builds worlds. Adopting Unreal Engine 5 unifies the workflow under an industry standard, which could streamline collaboration and attract talent familiar with the engine. The commitment to technologies like Nanite, Lumen, and Path Tracing signals a clear ambition: to set a new benchmark in visual fidelity and immersion for open-world video games. 🚀