[voidr]

In Cyberpunk 2077: you can go from one end of the open world to the other, without ever seeing a loading screen, you can even install a mod that allows your car to fly and you can see the whole city from the top, I haven't seen a game like that in UE5 at that level therefore there is a possibility that it would struggle with something like that if it's not designed to cope with it.

Video games use a trick called Level Of Detail, which means if something is far away, you only render a very low definition version of that object, UE5 has it as well, however we don't know if it's capable enough for something like Night City, obviously the RED engine was built with a very hardcore LOD system that might be a massive pain to do in UE5.

[robswc]

So the investment into seeing if UE5 would work with something like CP2077 would be greater than the investment into a new engine? Or perhaps the risks are greater? I could see getting 75% of the way there and realizing its starting to buckle would be pretty detrimental.

[voidr]

Looking at the Witcher 2, 3 and CP2077, I'm highly skeptical that the engine was the problem.

I also have my doubts if they would haven been able to do the same thing better on older consoles with Unreal Engine.

Most of the worst issues with CP2077 have nothing to do with the game engine, things like the NPC AI and broken difficulty curve, the rough melee combat and hiring a shady testing company.

The one thing that could be blamed on the engine is the potentially difficult tooling for the content creators, which can easily be solved, just look at the amount of mods out there.

From the outside, this looks more like a business decision rather than a technical one, that's not to say that it could not work out for CDPR if Epic works with them very closely, however I'm very annoyed when games journalists imply that CP2077 would have been amazing at launch if they would have used Unreal.