CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5 | Hacker News Reader

CD Projekt is remaking the first Witcher game in Unreal Engine 5

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261 pointsibobev222 comments

Remakes make business sense. Every game is a risk. A portfolio of products that includes remakes reduces that risk. A game that was previously popular is easier to remaster than trying to make some new that's less tested. There are always brand new gamers to introduce to your IP as well as existing gamers who may have missed or want to replay earlier games. If you're a mature studio it's almost irresponsible to not do this.

The more interesting part of the story is Unreal is being used. For a while Unity and Unreal have been pushing out in-house engines. Again standard tools make it easier to hire expertise and use existing solutions and assets, they're also far cheaper than running a full engine team. Supporting a custom engine is a massive undertaking at the high end (ignore the tech, on-boarding people, docs, QA, surrounding tools for artists, sound designers, localisation etc. And then making it work on a wide variety of hardware and working around any graphics bugs etc).

I agree with you. And it is still hard to get it wright in order to be sold.

If you want to stand up to competition, you need a cash cow. I don't blame any independent studio to do just that. They have to balance risks.

It's also a really good time to get into the remake business, tech-wise. We have a bunch of fresh new consoles optimized for the latest game engines, and tons of ML-based upscaling tech to play with. If you make a well-designed remake of your game optimized for solid-state storage, you should have a version that lasts a couple decades into the future.

> The more interesting part of the story is Unreal is being used. For a while Unity and Unreal have been pushing out in-house engines.

This is exactly the case for CD Projekt Red. They built their own engine (RED Engine) for Witcher 1 and built on top of it for the two Witcher sequels and also pushed it to its very limits for Cyberpunk 2077. A lot of useful criticism of the technological pains (delays, marketplace reception issues) they experienced with Cyberpunk was that they were using an in-house game engine unprepared for that genre (jumping from a game series where the fastest vehicle was a horse to one with cars and flying cars and planes is maybe not the easiest straight line). CDPR responded to that criticism, especially from their shareholders, that they would be minimizing that risk in future games development and externalizing that dependency and moving to an out-of-the-box game engine moving forward (including in that announcement that it would be Unreal).

This announcement for the Witcher 1 remake seems like a proper and interesting "full circle" for this story: CDPR's last engine was built entirely for Witcher 1. Using off-the-shelf Unreal to remake Witcher 1 sounds like a smart way on paper to get their feet wet and move on from the old engine to the new one using a project they are already familiar with and can help them realign from old pipelines to new ones.

> This is exactly the case for CD Projekt Red. They built their own engine (RED Engine) for Witcher 1 and built on top of it for the two Witcher sequels and also pushed it to its very limits for Cyberpunk 2077.

Close. REDEngine was created for Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. Witcher 1 was built on a modified copy of Bioware's Aurora Engine (the Neverwinter Nights engine).

REDEngine versions were:

REDEngine 1: The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

REDEngine 2: The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings – Enhanced Edition

REDEngine 3: The Witcher 3

REDEngine 4: Cyberpunk 2077

To add to that (since I'm somewhat of an expert on this), the engine for Cyberpunk 2077 was completely rewritten from scratch, and only small bits were either ported from W3 or inspired by what was done in W3.

Huh that’s super interesting — full rewrites aren’t super common. Do you know why they elected to rewrite the engine completely?

I have to be careful here, but the simple reason is that the previous engine was not designed to handle the density nor the verticality of the CP77 world.

Not that Unreal Engine 5 can handle a world like CP77 either, despite what people may think with the Matrix demo.

Game dev isn't my field, I always find it fascinating though.

Why can't Unreal handle something like CP2077? Could be an "explain like I'm five" - details would be cool but I'm not sure I would even fully understand them, haha.

"can't handle" here means "can't handle performantly".

Think of it like using the wrong data structure for the problem.

And not just for the game itself but for creating the world in the first place. Often you need radically different data structures for the creation and editing of the data as compared to what you need for running the game on player's machines.

I'm not an expert on the topic either, but from similar discussions I've followed, the answer tends to be that out of the box and with the base settings, an engine like UE5 will be optimised for certain use cases. Different genres will have different specific needs, and may require your developers to do a lot of heavy lifting to make the engine performant under their specific conditions. A good example might be sim racing titles, which generally have the player moving a lot faster than the default scenario for an engine (which is mostly a slow-moving FPS, for example). At these relatively high speeds, the default antialiasing methods may result in serious graphical artifacts, and at the rate at which physics needs to be calculated (90-300 hertz) the default physics of the engine may be less useful, and you're forced to implement your own from scratch. That's not to say it's impossible, but you're opting out from a lot of the engine features, or in some cases, it's actively making your life hard.

Awesome answer. Thanks for those examples, makes a ton of sense!

I just assumed in 99% of cases, you could just "tweak" Unreal but if its issues with core components of the engine... I could see why an engine from scratch may work better.

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.

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.

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.

Do they license their engine? Building it just for CP77 would be a shame.

How is Unreal limited in a way that prevents it from doing something like CP77?

Interesting! I’m not at all familiar with game engine design or even game dev, but the only game series I can think of that reliably handles large, open-world scale well is GTA.

Here’s a dumb question: in theory, would Rockstar’s internal engine (RAGE) have worked for CP77, or are the technical challenges simply too different?

The easiest dumb answer is that Rockstar has never licensed RAGE to an external developer and presumably doesn't develop the engine with that in mind at all so it is probably under-documented and hard to work with for any team that isn't Rockstar.

Also, I think there are other engines that do as well as RAGE, but none of them are licensed for external use either and are secret sauce to their various developers.

I think that’s fairly self-evident, hence my inclusion of “in theory” :)

Are there other internal engines that have been used for open-world games with detail and scale at the level of GTA or RDR?

Just off the top of my head:

Volition's multiple unnamed/unbranded engines for the Saints Row franchise.

The RenderWare fork used for Crackdown 1. The unknown engine for Crackdown 2 (presumed to be an iteration of the Crackdown 1 engine). (Crackdown 3 used Unreal Engine 4. Useful to mention for those elsewhere in this thread concerned Unreal "can't" do it.)

You can argue that BioWare has tried its raw best to push EA DICE's Frostbite engine as much as possible in that direction. DAI and MEA didn't have truly seamless open-world games, but they tried to get the biggest scale of levels that Frostbite seemed capable of and at their best felt "close". (Obviously at their worst they felt nothing at all like GTA/RDR level of detail/size.)

Thanks for the list!

If Unreal Engine 5 can't handle a world like CP77, why are they making the sequel to CP77 in Unreal Engine? Are they betting on the engine being ready for CP77's sequel when they need it to be?

I remember Neverwinter Nights 2. Decently fun game, but extremely buggy. It had some strange local lag where it wasn’t that unusual to command a character to move only to have them freeze in place then teleport back where they were 10 seconds before.

NWN2 was such an odd duck from an engine reuse perspective. When development on NWN2 began, Obsidian was handed a much older version of the Aurora engine source than what was currently available. While they did do amazing work with what they had, many weird bugs that were addressed by updated versions of mainline Aurora were now things Obsidian had to address in addition to the challenges they had to update the engine for the new game.

And if i remember correctly the aurora engine started life as MDK2.

As far as I remember, the first Witcher engine was a weird mash of the engine from neverwinter nights 2 and their own modifications, and they introduced their own engine with the Witcher 2.

There was a UE5 Engine demo that used Witcher-like environments in their tech demo.

I don’t remember seeing that. I know of a demo in an arid environment and the Matrix demo.

Do you have a link to the one you’re referring to?

Finally found it: That's from Jasom Slama directly : https://youtu.be/zO9hRBRmPi8?t=34

Heck, something like Witcher 1 is relatively easy to pull off in UE5. XCom did it in UE3.5.

Witcher 3 being a third person game with no fast movement is also very doable. There's a plenty of adventure games made in UE using stteaming mechanics.

The moment you as cars or planes it gets much trickier. There's no example of UE5 flight sim I know of, for instance...

We had janky vehicles in UE way back when in the old Unreal Tournament 2003 - but that did not involve streaming levels.

> Using off-the-shelf Unreal to remake Witcher 1 sounds like a smart way on paper to get their feet wet and move on from the old engine to the new one using a project they are already familiar with and can help them realign from old pipelines to new ones.

You're wrong in more than one way. As others already noted, Witcher 1 did not use REDengine - but also, it's not CD Projekt RED who is remaking Witcher 1; they outsourced the development to another studio.

> A lot of useful criticism of the technological pains (delays, marketplace reception issues) they experienced with Cyberpunk was that they were using an in-house game engine unprepared for that genre (jumping from a game series where the fastest vehicle was a horse to one with cars and flying cars and planes is maybe not the easiest straight line).

What made it unprepared? What special needs did CP2077 pose against a game like Witcher 3 when both are similarly open-world exploration RPGs heavy on dialogue and cinematics?

Specifically implied there is that one of the technical complaints was "draw distance" at speed and issues with "pop in" where things that should be visible aren't visible until "too late" after when they should be. If you build and tune a game engine for traveling at horse speeds and then add in vehicles that move three/four/five times as fast and some of them can fly, that puts a lot of strain on however you tuned the engine for drawing things at horse speeds and the expected results line up with many of the complaints about "draw distance" at speed and issues with "pop in".

Which is not to say that that was definitely the reason for some of those issues existed, but it does line up with what you would expect adding faster vehicles to an engine that hadn't been prepared for that.

You'd think using Unreal Engine makes it easier to hire but that's not the case, it just means there's more competition for the people knowledgable in it, and it drives the people that want to work on something different to other studios. It also doesn't cut down on development time or the needed number of engine programmers since studios pretty much have to modify and enhance the engine, often replacing several components in order to ship the game. In some cases you'll end up with an incompatible fork which requires its own team to extend and enhance it, meaning that to upgrade to a newer version from Epic you'll need to spend months merging the codebases.

Overall I see the adoption of Unreal Engine as a net negative for the industry, it's reducing the landscape to a monoculture. For all the talk that Epic does about being against monopolies, Unreal Engine is becoming one in a big way, and killing the ecosystem as it grows.

Yeah. If a game isn't well suited to Unreal, that game may well just not get made. But then again Factorio is one of the best selling PC games of all time. Maybe gameplay finds a way.

On CDPR specifically, I hope didn't make the decision to drop Red Engine because they happened to be at their lowest/weakest point in the last couple years after Cyberpunk came out and before Cyberpunk had a comeback -- and that's why they didn't feel strong enough to maintain their own engine.

Before that moment they were on top, and very recently Cyberpunk has had a sort of public redemption and a surprisingly strong long-term player base, so it feels like a shame. I still haven't seen a game in Unreal that matches Cyberpunk on high end PC hardware overall. The only game other than Cyberpunk that justifies raytracing is Minecraft RTX IMO.

Thanks for the kind words, it means a bunch to me and other devs that worked on the game!

I cannot comment to why they decided to switch to Unreal, but it is one of the reasons I left. I hope it works out for them but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the next game release.

For employees of the game industry, aren't standardized engines a net positive?

I can't think of many things worse in software development than "I'm an expert on my employer's obscure, only-used-here system."

Your employer knows you can't work anywhere else, and assuming they don't shoot themselves in the foot by allowing one person to become mission critical, they've definitely got the power in negotiations.

This is a fairly nuanced question so I'll try to explain some of the reasoning.

Unreal Engine is standard in so far as studios use it as a base in developing their own game, where they end up creating a fork because they need to adapt or more often replace entire systems. So in the end each studio ends up with their own non-standard fork of the engine, branched from a specific revision, and merging the latest changes from upstream will be at least a month long endevour. This is what I know from personal experience and from interviewing at about a dozen studios last year.

With this you get a slightly different version of the engine and tools at each studio, and it affects disciplines differently. For some creatives it ends up being the same at every studio because the tools they interact with remain largely unchanged, for others they end up using custom built tools at each studio. Likewise some programmers are fine just using the engine and developing systems on top, but others are not and it drives a lot of skilled people away.

So as an employee it is a double edged sword, on the one hand there's at least some standardisation where you are at least familiar with the tools and engine used in the new studio you're joining, but on the other hand you're now one in tens-of-thousands and much more of a replacable cog.

That is one of the supposed selling points of Unreal Engine to studios - that they can hire staff more easily - but if every studio uses the same engine then it's not a benefit. It also means that some skilled people won't want to join the studio, as they don't want to rewrite systems or be a code-janitor, and I've heard many people leaving studios because they switched to Unreal.

I don't follow game development closely anymore, but my feeling is that UE5 with features like Nanite, Lumen, etc is so advanced that you can't expect an inhouse engine to come close. Or are there other engines that's at the same level? Frostbite used to be cutting edge years ago, but some of the developers left EA and I haven't seen any excitement about it since.

Add to that things like huge install base that should make it pretty well tested at this point, big asset library, plenty of educational material available, and I guess it's a pretty easy decision for game studios. But I'm not in the business, maybe there are big downsides as well.

You're pretty much on point, unless you're making something really specific/that needs every bit of performance that it can get, you're better served by an existing engine

A good example of something that was better served by inhouse engine is Factorio, but that' uncommon

Another case is doing something technologically simple enough that benefits from having a fully customized workflow outweigh having to write some stuff by yourself. This can happen with content-heavy genres like, say, 2D point'n'clicks - you don't get much by using an existing engine there, but you have to follow its idiosyncrasies which may or may not work well for you and your team.

Recruitment is part of it as . It’s not possible to find people that haven’t worked at your company to have experience with your custom engine - but you can hire people with years of experience with Unreal already and ramp them up for your specific game quickly.

I think you are on point. The engine source code is also available which helps to limit the risks of vendoring a core tool for big teams. The unreal engine product team seems to understand the market very well and has very good execution and marketing.

Engines are complex beast nowadays, my graduation thesis was porting a particle engine based visualization engine from NeXTSTEP into Windows.

What was a graduation thesis 20 something years ago, is nowadays a basic feature in a bullet point feature list.

Related, Jonathan Blow on custom vs 3rd party engines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOtxjOLst2k

I think remakes also work out well for consumers. Gaming isn't always about novel experiences. Sometimes you just find a satisfactory loop and want to stay in it. People have enjoyed chess for decades. For video games you can reuse the same gameplay elements and just apply the latest tech each time and people will enjoy it.

Personally I check the steam store regularly and buy new games often but I rarely end up playing them much because I prefer to just jump back in to Skyrim or some other game I have been playing for years.

Remakes make business sense. Every game is a risk.

Frankly I wish there were more remakes rather than Call of Warzone 86. So many games are deserving. Imagine getting a full-fat remake of Banjo Kazooie and Tooie.

Sometimes remakes can actually improve accessibility to an older game with a dated engine/mechanics and make it more enjoyable for newcomers to experience the earlier entries. See: Yakuza Kiwami and Yakuza Kiwami 2 (remade using the excellent Yakuza 0 engine/mechanics).

I do own Witcher 1/Witcher 2 (bought no-doubt during some Steam sale for like $5-$15, tops), and I vaguely recall playing W1 for like a half hour, then put it down and never touched it again. But somehow I then put 90+ hours into Witcher 3.

So yes, the idea of Witcher 1's story remade into a modern engine sounds great. Heck, I would've settled for just Witcher 3's engine. I don't think I'd plop $60 for it--especially considering I waited until I could grab W3 GOTY Edition for like $20 before buying--but it's definitely something I'd eventually want to check out.

I think yours is a pretty common experience considering that Witcher 3 was a huge mass-market success and Witcher 1 was a niche product made both by and for insane people. I say this as a shameless Witcher 1 apologist.

I really wanted to play the games in order, but I found the gameplay in 1 un-fun and quit.

I almost regret how long it put me off 3

Witcher 1 has a decent story and world (in no small part due to the source material). But the gameplay itself is some of the worst that you experience.

They could have redone it as a Carmen San Diego style dialog game and it would have been better than the turd they shipped. It's really quite bad.

This is true.

The story carried Witcher 1. Gameplay was vastly improved in 2 and I have mixed feelings about 3, the game was definitely more successful and I think you can partially attribute that to changes that made it easier to play and thus much more console friendly.

I for one welcome a UE5 remake of Witcher 1 and will purchase it for sure, if only for nostalgia sake.

It's been too long since I played Witcher 1 to really remember the feel but I never had the complaints other people constantly bring up. In fact I put off Witcher 2 for some time because unlike Witcher 1 it seemed to require using a controller to have a decent experience, but Witcher 1 was great (in my vague memory) with keyboard and mouse. (I also had a slow start-and-restart phase with Witcher 2 because it takes a while to really open up more, but when it does, it's a fantastic game too. Witcher 3 improved on that and you get into things immediately.)

Some elements were better. For example potion mechanics was the best in W1. You could only make them near fire which means there was risk/reward and safe places mattered, and the system had some depth with matching secondary ingredients and managing positive and negative side effects.

W2 made alchemy useless cause potions lasted like 3 minutes and cut-scenes were included in that time (so you take a 3 minute potion, enter a 2 minute cut-scene and your potion stops working 1 minute into the boss fight). And W3 made potions less of a hassle by auto-refill but streamlined this too much - you could refill anywhere so you always had potions so resource management wasn't required. And the secondary ingredients and side effects were gone so the system is much simpler.

Also the tactical aspect of combat was ok in W1 - adjusting the fighting style and sword combination to the enemies. It just wasn't an action-RPG despite the action-RPG interface. It would be better served by turn-based combat.

>Witcher 1 has a decent story and world (in no small part due to the source material). But the gameplay itself is some of the worst that you experience.

The Witcher 1 combat is secretly not bad. It looks like an action game though and the game does a terrible job explaining why this is wrong. So it feels absolutely horrible. You have to understand it's more of a rhythm game. It's closer to Assassin's creed or Batman combat systems. There's a lot happening on screen but you are mostly waiting for the right moment and choosing tactics.

I played W1 when it came out and it was great. But couldn't imagine playing it after Witcher 3 because W3 is in a different universe of quality and polish. A remake is fantastic news.

I started to play, but never finished, both the first and second Witcher games after also purchasing them on sale at massive discounts. I gained an appreciation for advances made in character movement and player input, including UI elements like menus and pop-ups for quick actions. Old games play very clunky.

I'd hesitate to even call Witcher 1 the same genre as the later 2. The original's combat is just a blend of old school crpg and oddly rhythm games (with the sword styles all requiring clicking in a different rhythm pattern)

You're right and I agree remakes can be great to (re)discover old classics, but just a nitpick: Yakuza Kiwami 2 was based on the Yakuza 6 engine, not the Yakuza 0 one.

My mistake. They were both spurred by the surprise success of Yakuza 0 overseas, so I assumed they were both on the same engine. But based on the release order, it made sense that they would've switched to Y6.

> Now we know that it's a ground-up remake of the game that introduced Geralt of Rivia to Witcher fans outside of Poland.

I was always of the impression that it was Witcher III that achieved this.

I'm Polish so I genuinely don't know. Were the previous two installments popular outside of Poland?

Witcher 2 was popular in my social circle in the USA. A lot of us went back to Witcher 1 afterwards to get a better idea of the story.

So I'd say Witcher 2 was when the series started to get popular. Witcher 3 was riding on 2's coattails. Now that the Netflix show is popular, Witcher1 does deserve a remake.

I can only speak for Czechia and here the Witcher II definitely made a splash.

I would say W1 was successful too. At least for me it has stronger story telling then W2 which is too political for me.

> Were the previous two installments popular outside of Poland?

I would guess so, but the third one was even more popular. Maybe 3 is a bit like Skyrim.

I only played the third one. One of my friends was already a fan of the other 2 back then.

They were moderately popular games in the US for those that didn't constrain themselves to the AAA powerhouses (no judgement either way). I didn't play them at the time, but knew of their existence and that they were supposed to be good.

> Were the previous two installments popular outside of Poland?

Witcher 2 was the first time I heard of the franchise.

Heavy gamer here. I heard of the first Witcher but didn't think to play it until after I tried The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, which is still my favorite game in the series.

According to this site (can't vouch for how accurate their numbers are) The Witcher III sold ~12 million copies on Steam, The Witcher II sold ~6 million, and the original sold ~3 million. That's not counting sales on GOG and other stores, consoles, etc. And I personally got copies of the first and second game around the time the second game released.

https://vginsights.com/game/292030

If it doesn't count sales on GOG then it's not really reliable. GOG is owned by CD Projekt group, and one of the big points when releasing Witcher games was that people bought them on GOG so that all money went to the devs instead of paying the Steam tax.

How many people were aware of that campaign? Maybe in the Witcher/CDPR superfan groups, but on the scale of 12 million copies I can't imagine it budges the number that much.

I don't know why we're only talking about the PC version anyway, there's apparently been 40 million copies sold across all platforms according to a quick Google search, so most people didn't even play on PC.

>I don't know why we're only talking about the PC version anyway

Because the post I was replying to was about the popularity of The Witcher in the west before The Witcher III, and the first Witcher game was a PC exclusive so there are no console sales to factor in to the comparison.

I saw the tech demo for Witcher 1 and got the game subsequently afterwards. I lived in Canada at the time.

Witcher 1 not so much, but Witcher 2 had a pretty good 360 port that a lot of people played in the West, and PC version did well too - across all platforms 1.7 million copies sold by 2012, another article I saw suggests 8 million by 2014.

I think thats getting towards very roughly ~1/4 the success of Witcher 3, volume wise. Not bad, considering Witcher 3 volume includes a portable Switch release.

> https://www.eurogamer.net/the-witcher-2-sales-top-1-7-millio...

etc.

> Not bad, considering Witcher 3 volume includes a portable Switch release.

I've seen the Switcher. Wasn't actually half as bad as I anticipated. All the more surprising that CDPR is abandoning their own engine in favour of UE5.

I don't think they're abandoning it, they are just going to hire a new team to remake W1 in Unreal Engine, while the core team works on new games using proprietary tools

Actually no, they announced some time ago that the next Witcher games (a trilogy) would be made with UE5.

their "own engine" I think is a euphemism here - its arguably several different ones. By many internal accounts, engine development has been hell (see the Cyberpunk launch issues), with each game CD Project Red start being in many ways a complete rewrite to the extent its not charitable to describe it as a single engine.

I think less time on game engine tech and hopefully more on shipping creative features sounds good to me, although it is sad to lose yet another independently developed game engine.

> with each game CD Project Red start being in many ways a complete rewrite to the extent its not charitable to describe it as a single engine.

That's normal and fully expected. You generally don't maintain an in-house engine the way general-purpose engines are maintained. You don't make it as generic as possible to accommodate for various uses, like Godot, Unreal or Unity do. Instead, you make games and then your engine is an optional byproduct of those games. It gets to be as specific to your game as you need or want it to be.

The first game was rough but very enjoyable, And I actually liked the second one a lot as well. (even have the special edition with the coin/maps/booklets and all that jazz)

Still haven't finished the main story of the third game tough...

Witcher 1 made a big splash among fans of PC RPGs and action RPGs. Didn't hurt that it landed in the middle of a relative doldrums for those genres—they got much healthier again a bit after that.

2 and 3 switched to a more console-friendly style of play and had good success there, though, so I expect they did more to spread the word than 1 did.

I can only really speak to my experience, but I don't really remember Witcher 1 being a thing. Witcher 2 was pretty big and then Witcher 3 was pretty massive.

The Witcher 1 had a relatively large cult following for such an obscure game. The Witcher 2 took it to the next level.

I was a relatively active PC gamer in the US at the time they all came out...

I somehow didn't know about Witcher until the third made a big wave! Granted, I was only playing some of the most obvious/big RPGs at the time

At the time I was more into FPS

Popular might be a stretch, but they had their audience. I played Witcher 1 shortly after it came out and I bought the collectors edition of Witcher 2 on release. So there were definitely fans out there. But it definitely wasn’t popular in the way that, say, Mass Effect (which came out around about the same time) was popular.

witcher 1 spread to all dnd groups I had contact with back in Italy. not a large sample size, but within our niche it was well known and well received, jankiness notwithstanding

Witch 2 definitely was. Witcher 1...maybe? I thought it was a pretty mediocre game, so I doubt it was really that popular anywhere outside of Poland.

What's impressive is how much better each sequel was compared to the previous game. It was a giant leap in both graphics and gameplay from 1 to 2 and 2 to 3.

> I'm Polish so I genuinely don't know. Were the previous two installments popular outside of Poland?

Not as much as the 3rd one but popular enough to get two sequels.

Witcher 1 was pretty niche but I played it as a 15 year old rpg fan and liked it a lot. It wasn't as well known mainstream as mass effect but most gamers surely at least heard of it.

Yes, they were very popular in some circles. My preferred Witcher games are, in order, 3 then 1 then 2. I vividly remember Witcher 1 for one very difficult battle in the first part and some yellow fields later on. In Witcher 2 the combat system was not that pleasant for me, so I did not play too much even if I bought it. For Witcher 3 I waited a couple of years after I bought it to play it, waiting for a new GPU that was good enough to play on highest detail level.

Its not great data, but peak Steam player counts:

Witcher 1 Enhanced Edition: 12,685

Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition: 12,884

Witcher 3 Wild Hunt: 103,329

When I first played W1, there was no North American release. I only found it because metacritic listed it with fantastic reviews in Europe and I tracked down a place to buy it there.

It was an amazing game at the time.

From what I saw Witcher 1 had a following in RPG players, back in the day I remember seeing one guy at multiple lans play the game. Witcher 3 though was the big breakout where I saw people get excited for it and play it.

Witcher 1 & 2 were popular within the PC RPG niche in France. It attracted the same types that were into Neverwinter Nights, Gothic 2, Morrowind etc.

I don't know why, this makes me a bit sad. You can sort of feel a game engine when you're playing a game. The GTA trilogy lost a lot when they did their remastering project with a different engine. Although I'm sure it can be done well.

StarCraft remastered was done really well, but I believe they built on top of their existing engine.

As someone who played a few hours of the 1st Witcher Game... Good.

No one seems to care about Witcher 1's engine, because it was hot garbage. Any engine (even an off-the-shelf one like Unreal5) will be grossly superior to the trash that the original game was.

This remake can have slow, barely workable controls and pretty bad graphics and still be far better than the original game.

They really just need the Witcher 1 remade so that people have an entry point into the story. The actual "gameplay" from the original will _NOT_ be missed. IMO anyway.

I played the Witcher 1 when it came out and thought it was a brilliant game. I haven't tried going back to it ever. It felt quite polished to me then. I'm curious what people feel isn't approachable for today's audiences. Is is merely that we are used to different visuals now?

What are these engine issues in Witcher 1 you speak of? As a player I did not notice them back in the day.

Its not the polish that was bad.

I've played many 3d action-RPG games. Zelda, Monster Hunter, Dynasty Warriors, etc. etc. Witcher1's combat is by far the worst of the series.

Just... laggy, non-responsive controls. But in a bad way (ex: Monster Hunter is also laggy/non-responsive, but in a way that's "obvious" that the slowdown is purposeful and tactical. You need to be very careful about when you attack or not attack vs various monsters in that game).

Witcher 1's combat in contrast, has a lot of repetition and not a lot of depth IMO. At least, from what I remember. Witcher2 onwards had much better ideas of "fun combat" experiences.

--------

I can still go back to old PS2 era Dynasty Warriors, mash square and have fun. Its not about "dated graphics". I admit dynasty warriors is a mashy-heavy game with a casual mindset, but I think Witcher couldn't really decide if it wanted to be a punishing slow game (like Monster Hunter/Souls series), or a faster twitch game, and just weirdly plays in this unfun position between the two extremes.

Its fine to have a slow punishing game (Monster Hunter / Souls / etc. etc.), but you need a huge variety of bosses to keep interest. Witcher 1 felt pretty stale after a short time, since there's just not as much variety.

Somehow, I don't find Dynasty Warriors gameplay stale (despite being a square-mash simulator). I don't fully understand why however. I guess DW is more about positioning of the player-character (the enemy army is always winning where you are _not_ located, so Dynasty Warriors feels more like a firefighter simulator, where you're running around the battlefield trying to fix issues in the army... rather than really being a combat game?)

I think a big problem with Witcher 1 is that its vision for combat was relatively novel and not well presented. In the lore it's emphasized that fighting is supposed to be a sort of graceful dance and so the combat tries to mimic that. The combat is much more like a bemani (beat/music type game) game than an action RPG, even though it looks nothing like the former and everything like the latter.

Once you 'get' this, everything makes way more sense, the game flows, and it becomes really quite fun. I played it when it first came out. I didn't get it, and quit before beating the first chapter. I later replayed it, got it, and ended up playing through it multiple times on max difficulty.

> But in a bad way (ex: Monster Hunter is also laggy/non-responsive, but in a way that's "obvious" that the slowdown is purposeful and tactical. You need to be very careful about when you attack or not attack vs various monsters in that game).

That's actually why I stopped playing Monster Hunter: I really hate the non-responsiveness, it feels like wading through molasses.

You're super slow because you need to predict things like 2... 3... maybe even 5 seconds+ in advance.

Monster Hunter basically forces you to memorize the way the monsters move. Its not for everyone, but its in the title. "Monster Hunter". You gotta keep practicing vs the same monster over-and-over until you memorize its patterns before you really get the joy of success in that game.

When you're finally cool with one monster, you move on to learn the patterns of the next, etc. etc. Its a "take it at your own pace" kinda game. No story, just hunting.

Honestly, to me it feels more like Monster Hunter is just a rhythm game dressed up in a fighting system. It's almost like a dance with the monster.

But that's not what I'm looking for in a game, I generally want the agility of e.g. Mirror's Edge ^^

> It's not the polish that was bad.

Indeed, it would be weird if CDPR had trouble with Polish.

Not the person you're replying to, but the original Witcher felt fine to me too, but I'm a lifelong PC gamer and the interface/controls reminded me of older PC-only CRPGs like Summoner or even Neverwinter Nights. I love those games, but in terms of their control schemes they do feel clunky compared to the more visceral controller-optimized and streamlined Action RPG controls of The Witcher 2 and 3.

In other words, the first Witcher game is in more of a niche genre with significantly less mainstream appeal in terms of gameplay and UI.

It was based on the Neverwinter Nights 2 engine, so the similarities to NWN are expected. Actually, from my perspective, combat in W1 was a big improvement over the turn based click and pray combat of NWN.

I liked Neverwinter Nights 2 -- so no wonder I liked playing The Witcher 1. I think I played on a very underpowered laptop back then (as a college student), so if the engine was sluggish I probably attributed that to gaming on a laptop :D

I loved the game and beat it twice (maybe 3 times? not sure) but the engine performs like dogshit for the level of graphical quality it delivers.

It was very good for the time the game was launched, but it is quite outdated. I loved the game, but it is in the category of games I would love to play again, I install it, then the graphics looks so bad it turns me down. Believe me, I started playing computer games ~ 1986, so I know what bad graphics is, but Witcher 1 is a lot more recent than that and the expectations are a lot higher.

The Witcher ran on a heavily modified version of the Aurora engine, which was used for the Bioware Neverwinter Nights.

My first attempt didn't go well either but I am glad I gave it a second chance. Once it starts winning you over, it is really good.

The fighting system is pretty old-school but once you get used to it, it is quite fun. It is very authentic to how Geralt is fighting in the Witcher books. It is simply more about rhythm and tactics than one might be used to.

Just because Witcher 1 is kind of hard to recommend for a casual gamer in 2022, does not mean it is garbage. It is just different. It has more of a niche appeal.

I am absolutely glad I got to play the original and some of its charm are the things are probably going to be modernized away in the remake.

The engine was fine, it was a square peg / round hole situation.

They picked an off-the-shelf engine that was designed to simulate tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons in 3D. Maybe they got a good deal on it.

The bird's-eye click-to-move camera mode is what the engine was designed for, but the developers kludged in some keyboard controls because they were making an action game.

The odd timing-based fighting styles sort of make sense, because the engine wanted to handle combat with dice rolls on a mostly-fixed interval.

It could have turned out a lot worse, when you consider what they were working with. I hope they keep some of the weird quirks, like the rhythm swordplay.

W1 and W2 barely make any splashes in the story department when W3 is in the picture. You might as well just spend a weekend to read through Sapkowski's six novels instead, W3 takes over from the point where his last novel ends.

The GTA remaster issues were hardly due to the engine. People over-focus on the engine. I wouldn't worry about this.

The graphics look plastic. Is it not because of an engine? Serious question.

I don't know of any engines that dictate material properties. There are some where the default settings on the default materials are questionable coughUnity3Dcough. But a big studio game shouldn't/wouldn't be using the defaults on just about anything.

One of the biggest things indie game developers can do to not look like an indie game is to stop using the default settings on the default materials. Not necessarily even using custom materials. Just don't use the default settings.

I would say yes and no. Yes, obviously the renderer is there but at the same time it's only doing what it was told to do. Taking Unity and Unreal as examples, you can make something look plastic, cartoony, realistic, a mixture, or really anything you want. Usually there will be art director(s) (or a someone with a similar title) that make sure the art/graphics stick with a certain look and feel so I would put the blame more on them than the engine.

It's hard to know for sure but most people believe they did a ton of either super rushed manual work and/or AI upscaling on the textures and models that would explain the "plastic" look to everything. It doesn't really matter what engine is backing it if the textures and modeling are bad. And if they didn't spend the time to sort out material properties then the engine won't treat skin any differently than cloth, or cloth differently than metal, etc.

these are more examples of modelling issues but it shows how little care and QA went into the remake:

they rounded out this 6-sided nut : https://old.reddit.com/r/GTA/comments/quutz7/definitive_lazy...

hot dog fingers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQWw0hHMUoc

Of course not. Unreal Engine uses a PBR pipeline as any modern engine does. If your materials look plastic it's because that how you authored them, not because of the engine.

Starcraft Remastered was designed with the explicit goal of changing as little as possible. The target audience for the remaster is well-versed in the bugs of the original game and wanted them reproduced.

Compare with Warcraft III Reforged. Modding with the original WC3 was extremely popular: DotA started as a mod for WC3, so Blizzard should have focused on compatibility. Not doing so led to the poor reception.

>don't know why, this makes me a bit sad. You can sort of feel a game engine when you're playing a game.

absolutely. whenever a friend is playing anything with specific shader/specular/lighting styles I always yell "Unity!" while watching him. I'm generally dead-on accurate with those guesses. It's definetly not coincidence at this point; there is some default behavior or lighting gimmick I can generally always cue in on with regards to Unity. I think it's their style of specular lighting glow that gets painted onto way too many things by most creators.

I don't use the engine myself, so I can't tell you exactly what it is I hone in on, but I can for most titles.

Default post processing and anti aliasing are usually dead giveaways.

There's always been something about the Source engine that felt distinctive. The lighting and physics feel weird and creepy.

Given how poorly XCOM ran, I was convinced it was written in Unity. Eventually looked it up one day and nope, Unreal.

Great game though.

The GTA trilogy remasters actually run on the original game engine under the hood, the only thing they changed was the renderer (Unreal Engine instead of RenderWare).

The modern DOOM 1/2 releases on Android/iOS/Switch/Xbox/PS does something similar: it is using the original renderer but uses Unity to handle input and output for easier portability.

Wasn't GTA the one where the "re-make" was done using a hot garbage mobile port of the games? That would be why if so.

Why? the graphics and animation did not age very well, so they need to be entirely redone, and the combat rethinked. But the last act will look quite epic on a modern engine if done well. Unreal use will allow faster development.

Witcher 1's main quest is the most interesting of the 3 games, I hope they do not commit the mistake of adding a minimap to casualize the remake, paying attention to the dialogues, environmental details and exploring the maps is very much what made the game interesting to me. It's one of these games where you can get stuck if you are not paying attention to the story, or miss certain timed events, which increases its replay value. It's much more interesting that just spamming witcher senses all the time to complete quests.

To those who didn't play the game, this is very much a "detective" story and most quests are shrouded in mystery, it can works ONLY if the player has to pay attention to the dialogues, lore and story. It will not work if the player is spoon-fed every little detail about who is whom, what potion to use or the devs resorts to bringing back the "witcher senses".

Just like Witcher 2, one can "side" with either of 2 camps, unlike Witcher 2, one can decide not to side with anybody, although choosing the latter option might not lead to the most positive outcome...

> You can sort of feel a game engine when you're playing a game.

This is nice usually, but such a curse for procedural games. Once you start internalizing the RNG you stop thinking of yourself as exploring an environment, and more in terms of rolling dice: "oh, rolled a general shop, no mimic, one fountain and the Gnomish Caves entrance". At least nethack has enough crazy shit happening that it gives the levels personality regardless.

Same thing with AI enemies in strategy/4X games. Deep down it's just some form of RNG+rules based on "personality" values and current situation, but there's no real strategy. Just a simulation of it.

Which makes you think, with AlphaStar defeating pro players since 2019, where's the AI 4X games deserve? While 4X games might be crazy when good humans play multiplayer, the average 4X solo player does a limited set of actions and uses much less strategy than in StarCraft.

I was a fan of the game, but the engines limitations did hurt it in my opinion and the combat was its weakest aspect. The story, characters, world and quests were its strong points. So I’m greatly looking forward to this remake, if it provides all the original content with less jankyness and smoother combat.

As someone playing through Witcher 3 on a Steam Deck for the first time, to say that I'm wildly excited about this is not an understatement. Witcher 2 currently appears to be a no-go on the Deck and I'd love to play the rest of the games in the series.

Witcher 2 also runs perfectly fine on the Deck. You just need to switch to Proton-GE rather than default version.

There's also a native version, right?

The "native" linux version of Witcher 2 does emulations. Since it's bundled it's very out of date and technology has advanced since then. Witcher 2 had really bad graphics bugs on my Linux playthrough, none of which appeared on Windows.

Do you mind if I ask what settings you run it on and how happy you are with the performance? I'm precontemplatively considering a steam deck but haven't really looked into it.

Not OP but ProtonDB has you covered: https://www.protondb.com/app/20920

Fantastic site.

Sure. I left it on default settings and the video/graphics performance along with the playability has been truly remarkable. The stereo surround is also quite good. I suppose some criticisms might be that the battery goes pretty quickly (~1 hour) and it does get very warm, but I find these tradeoffs easy to live with. I've only had my deck for about a month and this is my first game to play through on it.

I'm a software engineer with a ton of Linux experience so hacking the Deck doesn't scare me at all; I've read quite a bit about it. But I figured I'd give it a go first with the out-of-the-box configuration and so far have been thoroughly impressed.

Thats great. Thanks!

People complaining about this being a remake, but I'm assuming they made the remake as a way for their developers to get use to Unreal 5 before making Witcher 4 which is also built using Unreal 5.

Easier to build a game you already know in a new game engine than to create a completely new game. Especially if you don't want the game to be filled with bugs.

CD has always used in an house game engine for their games.

I don't think that holds if you read the first paragraph of the article. Fool's Theory, a separate studio, is doing the remake in UE5; not CDPR. With that said, this will allow Fool's Theory to help as a support studio for Witcher 4 after the remake since they'll be using the same toolset.

Exactly; while CDPR and Fool's Theory will be working on different games, they'll be able to share resources extensively given the common platform. I wouldn't be surprised if they divide up work on a lot of the Witcher-specific extensions to Unreal's scripting, AI, and so on.

This reminds me of how Game Freak sent their recent Pokemon remake out to another studio to work on with different technology while Game Freak makes new franchise IP. 2 examples doesn't make a pattern but is this a known business strategy within game development?

Not only is this common but it's how some companies have built their reputation and money, see Bluepoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluepoint_Games#Games_develope...

That's true, although Fool's Theory is full of former CDPR people that worked on W3 and CP. I'm assuming it will be a similar situation to that of Spokko where eventually it might be brought under the CDP umbrella. (That's just speculation though, I don't have any insider knowledge on this).

I get the feeling that a lot of these game remakes are sort of IP normalization moves. Get all the studio's IP onto standard modern tools so that new game devs won't be surprised by custom engines to make maintenance and rerelease easier, especially as the studio transitions from a small boutique studio to a bog-standard AAA sweatshop.

I also think this is the reason for Naughty Dog rereleasing The Last of Us on PS5. Though the engine itself was written in C++, it used a lot of Scheme code to generate game data and components and I think they want to move off that because it's baffling to the new devs they want to onboard.

I'm waiting for Id Software to throw in the towel and rerelease Unreal versions of Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal.

Remakes are also used to train development teams on new tools. It takes the pressure of a team learning to grapple with a new engine if all of the content is already completed - there's a better scaffolding to build off of.

FWIW, Id Tech 7 is built to support a game like Doom:Eternal, and nothing more. And the game itself is shaped around the capabilities of the engine. That's why it works.

Note Id had a texture streaming system in Rage in order to support a large seamless game world, but they cut that large open world for Doom:2016 and Eternal. In contrast, CDPR's games just grew with each new Witcher release.

Has CDPR run out of ideas, but still had a bag of promises to make? They promised CP77 extensions and multiplayer, The Witcher 3 in 4k, now remaking Witcher 1? I'm kindof disappointed with this news and not hearing updates about previous "updates".

On the other hand Geralt waves his sword above his head like an idiot in Witcher 1. I hate remakes but if I had to have one this would be one.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/rkdbnv/started_play...

But yeah I want new stories more.

Yes, this is actually a game that would be well served by a remake that makes it more accessible.

The top comment in that thread you linked explains that sword movement is something from the books. No one's to say that'll be removed in a remake.

I don't remember him doing that in the books haha. He was a beautiful swordsman not a goofball.

If you're interested in their strategy check out this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EJmgTQ0O8k

And, it seems like a fantastic way to learn a new engine.

Its a third party studio doing the remake, CDPR probably won't be diverting many internal resources away from their existing in-house projects for this.

also this is just follow-up to a previous announcement where they announced 5 projects in various stages of development on top of info about the CP2077 expansion: https://ftw.usatoday.com/2022/10/cd-projekt-red-witcher-cybe...

They couldn't deliver 1 good project CP77, but now committing to 5 at around the same time?

You said:

>Its a third party studio doing the remake, CDPR probably won't be diverting many internal resources away from their existing in-house projects for this.

but the link claims:

>On Tuesday, CD Projekt Red announced five all-new games currently in development at the studio

Their stock price is near 5 year low, how can they afford it?

> Their stock price is near 5 year low, how can they afford it?

Stock price has nothing to do with how much money CDPR has in their bank accounts. Stock trading is basically a public opinion poll on the future of the company, but not a penny from those trades actually goes to company accounts.

Not entirely true. An equity price in the toilet means you might have to borrow money if you need a big chunk. It also weakens your ability to use stocks to pay employees which in turn requires additional cash outlays.

TL;DR: Companies still depend on equities as a funding mechanism.

and if a company is trading low, their trust is also low, am I wrong? They would will need to trick people into giving them money upfront (preorders?) or borrow from 3rd party to cover a product that will sell and bring cash.

nevertheless, I didn't mean they can't fund it because of low stock price, they got lots of free money from Polish government development fund, but CDPR delivered only 4 big games and only 2 were big hits, The Witcher and The Witcher 3. CP77 sold in many copies, I have one too, but I'm not buying them unless they prove it's worth the price. They completely lost my trust and employees with internal knowledge, who were committed to make Witchers a success story.

Previously delivering 2 (or 3) good games, having stock prices high during that time, getting free money from development fund vs now stock price low, trust in company and their quality dropped, 5 projects in progress? Aren't they shooting too high?

"Trust" is a broad term, so not the one I would use. It's more about expectations of future dividends (and expectations of other market participants' expectations of future dividends, and that goes on until some Nth derivative of the stock's underlying value, also because "growth" is a derivative of "future dividends")

Nearly every stock in Tech is down a lot this year. High growth, low profitability stocks are generally underwater. You'd have to compare their stock to similar companies to see if they are down more or less than those comparable peers.

> hey would will need to trick people into giving them money upfront (preorders?) or borrow from 3rd party to cover a product that will sell and bring cash.

My take on that is that with Witcher games and even with Cyberpunk they made a lot of money. In fact they made the amounts not often seen in Polish economy (I think at some point they were most valuable company in Poland). They should have a lot of cash saved, no need to borrow money.

EDIT: In fact I did find the info about their cash reserves and they are about $220M, which might not seem much from US perspective, but in Poland it is equivalent to their 3 years expenses.

>Their stock price is near 5 year low, how can they afford it?

It's new to me that the company makes its money selling its stock, not games.

Have you heard of Elon Musk?

I don't have much info any their organisation and teams, but it may not be a bad idea. Adding people to IT projects beyond some threshold doesn't really make them faster and spreading the risk across 5 projects may be better than going all-in with one.

Cyberpunk sold 20 million copies. The game was a critical disaster, to a certain extent, but was financially successful for the studio in the long run. The Witcher 3 in 2020 alone sold 30 million copies, so they're hardly hurting for cash.

Also "currently in development" does not mean every game is getting equal resources, or that each game is in the same stage of development.

>Their stock price is near 5 year low, how can they afford it?

It recently went up almost 50%.

Like 2 months ago their price was around 77-80

Now it is around 120~

I expect (I bet my money on) it to be around 150 around december/january

While it's surely a constant, I think the entertainment industries at large have really started to milk the nostalgia cow hard

I could say a bunch of soft science things like, go with a sure thing in an uncertain market, blah blah. I think it's simply easier

The start was about 20 years ago, but I do agree

It seems the start is always ~20 years ago from when you talk about, regardless of when you talk about this sort of thing.

It’s when it’s ready for a reboot! I strongly associate it with the movie industry running out of new ideas after the 90s. Episode 1 was 1999 for example, before that most people thought Star Wars was over. Then the marvel stuff.

But maybe that’s just me being nostalgic since that’s also around the time I began being an adult. It does seem convenient how it’s usually timed out so that parents can geek out with their kids; so the industry inherits a new generation of fans. My recent example of that is how apparently Pokémon is very popular again. I was too old to care in the 90s but those kids now have kids of similar age as they were at the time.

The phenomenon as a whole didn’t seem to exist so strongly prior to that. In the 80s if my dad showed me something he liked as a kid I just laughed it off as some old toy that had no relevance to me. My 4 yo loves Spider-Man and has no clue he’s older than me. They made a new show specifically targeting this age group (Spidey and his Amazing Friends).

Not at all, they have lots of new games coming.

Sibling comment has a link.

GAMERS RISE UP!

There's no way multiplayer would've made sense in CP77 with how OP the netrunner build was, nevermind how the Sandevistan is supposed to work across the wire. The game is completely unbalanced in the player's favor by early mid-game, another artifact of their hastened release process, I can't imagine what they'd have to do to push out a multiplayer mode.

> With the game being rebuilt in Unreal Engine 5, Fool's Theory will also have plenty of opportunity to revisit the somewhat clunky combat mechanics of the first game

Hopefully they will revisit them just long enough to throw them in the trash and implement an entirely different combat system than the bad ones they had in Witcher 1.

I've played Witcher I a lot and it's really fun, but I gave up on finishing it after I got stuck in a quest where I was in a cave fighting an infinite horde of enemies (with infinite respawn) and nothing happened no matter how many of them I killed.

I hope they fix these kinds of glitches as well.

I am so glad that there are so many avenues for independent game devs now, because large-ish studios seem to have dug a nice little rut in their old IP.

Remember: no preorders!

I couldn't get myself to play the first 2 Witcher games due to the dated mechanics but I watched other people stream their play throughs at the time.

> [removed] the playing cards players can earn that depict pinup art of Geralt's various sexual partners. The system has been criticized over the years for treating women's bodies as a reward for player progression.

This pin-up card collection of your sex partners was edgy in 2007 and 2011 as well. Its not like it was an especially unenlightened age of days bygone. The Pin-Up card system is definitely what put it on the map. Its really funny that CD Project [may] opt to launder its reputation now to reach a broader audience after only getting on the map for being absurd and over the top. I'm not advocating for anything, only observing.

The lesson broadcasted is that you have to do "degrading" and shocking things like that to stand out at all. Kind of like how many individuals get started in many industries to support themselves.

I'm not sure "laundering reputation" is how I would frame "re-evaluating including potentially objectionable content in a remake".

The reason I would frame it that way is because CD Projekt has subsequently had a fall from grace and are on thin ice regarding PR attack vectors

Meh. Steam's got a billion games now that do that exact thing. Tons and tons of games did before it, too. The only notable thing about it was having that kind of thing in a game that was otherwise good enough and had enough else going on not to be categorized primarily as a porn game.

I'll just wait for it to be modded back in.

[EDIT] Actually a few other mainstream non-porn games have done almost the same thing, since, too. The Saboteur comes to mind. Some whole series are all about that sort of thing, like DOA.

I played the Witcher when it was released back in the day; I had heard some vaguely good things about it, and it seemed like something I would enjoy. I had no idea the card thing existed until I actually received one. I remember laughing at how silly it was. I felt it kinda fit within the kind of semi-serious adult theme of the game; "your mother sucks dwarven cock" etc. From what I recall, the second game was a bit more serious; never played the third one.

I think the cards had basically nothing to do with the game success, and judging from the comments here, it seems the first game wasn't even all that successful in the first place.

They just replaced it with 3D sex scenes in the later ones, AFAIK. But for some reason that was OK, while fade-to-black and a pinup wasn't? It's weird.

The 3D scenes show a collaboration with women

The cards show a “notch on your belt”, which is something a lot of people are sensitive to and don’t want to perpetuate, when given the choice

So that’s what people are reacting to, not the mere presence of sexual encounters and explicitness at all

Said another way: Of the subset of people that are fine with explicit depictions in this medium, a broader subset of them want to depict more women as collaborators as opposed to prizes and collectibles. They found that depiction detracted from this particular series.

I began to play games more since the onset of the pandemic. One of the first games that I played was The Witcher 1. I actually played all three games in the series, but started with the first.

Of all three series, TW1 combat is the one I liked the best (seriously). Once you got the hang of it, it felt quite natural. On the other hand, TW2 combat felt like a stupid regression. TW3 combat was good but not as good as the first installment of the series.

Other things I liked from the first game and I honestly think are the best in all three games:

- lore system and content - signs - alchemy - potions - character progression and development.

Also, it is quite playable on Intel onboard GPUs.

I'm excited to learn that a remake is in the works, but I am afraid that all the above (and also romance cards, due to stupid PC stuff) will be gone in the remake.

This is a smart move imo: they can gain xp and build tooling for unreal 5. Part of what killed their last game is their engine. Now they can learn how to use a real game engine with a lower stakes game and prepare for witcher 4 or whatever comes next.

Now this is a remake I can actually see as being worth it. This is a great news for the Witcher game fans and these fans numbers are in millions.

Witcher 1 is a game in a number of acts, where each act is a relatively small closed space. It would be a really great way to get some UE5 knowledge to transplant into other games. By keeping those parts static in development, you get to use all the interesting new UE5 tech such as Lumen and Nanite.

Witcher 1 wound up being an unexpected hit for me. But I have a thing for the game play style of that game, being a WoW player for a long time. I totally get how it doesn't appeal to a lot of people and I hope this increases the reach of a game with a good story with otherwise dated gameplay.

I already played it, so I'm unexcited. Remakes these days generally seem like lazier ways to try to make money compared to making new art from scratch. I thought Cyberpunk was abysmal (though i loved the witcher games) so I wouldn't expect much from them anymore in any case.

What about Cyberpunk was abysmal to you? I really enjoyed the atmosphere and the gun-play. NPC animations left some to be desired, but overall I thought the graphics were super engaging and Night City was super fun to run around in.

Not OP, I wouldn't call CP2077 "abysmal" but even looking outside the bugs the game just wasn't anywhere near the quality I expect from CDPR. The gunplay was actually pretty mediocre, "better than Fallout" is not high praise and that's the best I could give it; the environment was pretty but lacked depth; I, personally, do not care fo

* The gunplay was mediocre, in my opinion. "Better than Fallout" is the rating I'd give it, and that's a "you did better coloring inside the lines than the kid with a motor disability" on my scale.

* While I'm talking about gameplay, driving ranks as "Better than GTA4", and see above for where that falls on my scale.

* The environment was pretty as all hell, but it felt shallow and unlived in due to a lack of unique characters that weren't copy-paste NPCs populating the world, a few fleshed out characters relating to the main story, and some uninspired side mission fillers. Witcher 3 may not be as shiny, or as dense, but the world feels more alive due to the detail put into it.

* This is a personal gripe, but I really did not care for the story and ludonarrative dissonance it creates. I'm also not a fan of being given an illusion of choice, when all the endings ultimately play out the same way with a different skin (see: Mass Effect 3).

There's more, but those are my biggest issues with the game, even discounting the AWFUL state the game was in for a long time.

I watched some footage of cyberpunk and the characters in it seemed so offputting that I never bought the game. Everyone in the game seemed to be some sort off money-grubbing primitive sociopath or a selfish asshole otherwise. I never bought GTA4/GTA5 for the same reason - I don't want to spend many hours in a game where I interact with characters I detest.

When Cyberpunk launched it had game breaking bugs. A lot of people got their refund and forgot about the game (and rightly so).

Everything with a woman protagonist that tries to ape male roles is probably going to be pretty bad.

CD Projekt is outsourcing this to another company to be precise.

I wonder if they will give them their cut-scene creation technology. It was one of the best parts of The Witcher 3 - the cinematography was great and showed the emotions much better than in any CRPG I played to this day.

I'd like to see a native Linux version this time, since UE5 supports it.

That said, original game with customized Aurora engine is very good. No big need for a remake, but if they'll make it fully open world it might be adding something interesting, besides simply improved graphics.

I'm both excited and terrified.

Excited b/c the Witcher is amazing and should be brought back for new players to experience.

Terrified b/c it gives Bethesda another way to put Skyrim out into the void - "The Unreal_edition_final_we_promise."

More and more it’s looking like the future of game development is Unreal / Unity mods.

I think we’re at the point where it’s virtually impossible to make a modern looking game from scratch. We’re already there with browsers.

I, for one, am tired of consuming warmed up content I've played through before. Be it Diablo 2 Resurrected or Mass Effect or or or. Create something new, don't refurbish old stuff. Such a waste.

Many other people enjoy long running series, and CD Projekt is perfectly capable of doing both. CP2077 was a new IP, and they are planning yet another new IP, code named Project Hadar to follow Witcher 4 and the next CP.

It’s a 15 year old niche game running on an old janky engine. A lot of people haven’t played it before, so personally I think a remaster is actually warranted in this case, given the popularity of the later games in the series.

I haven't played it, and 3 was pretty great, so I kinda want to, but I've heard the original is garbage, so I'm excited for a modern release

It's not garbage, but how often can you read one and the same book?

For people who never played it, meh ok, for me who has consumed pretty much every game since the c64 in the golden days.

It's like this "West" vs Russia thing, we had a cold war already, the 90s were awesome but I'm not looking forward to history repeating, 10 steps back into the cold war and hopefully not hot war.

Life is about making new experiences, repeating old experiences with better graphics is not exciting at all. It's also lazy.

Often the only thing that dates a game are the graphics (and sometimes the UI), so I'm all in favor of good graphical remakes where the original mechanics and story were sound

A hill I will die on is that Witcher 1 had good combat and should remain as is. But I can just feel that they will change it, and I already hate it.

sounds like bad news for their internal engineering team

Provided there's any of it left after Cyberpunk.

Or they can do like Rockstar and many others and outsource the port.

I'll play it, of course.

But I'm still enamoured with the perfect imperfections of their first effort.

I hope they build in jumping and do not change the combat system too much.

remakes are great and appeal to gamers who may have missed out on a generation. I loved Witcher 3 and never played witcher 1. I'd rather keep my existing hardware and play a remake than pay for upgraded hardware and play a dud.

"Canis Majoris" hehe, they sure know who the main boss of the game is.

Cdpr must release something great to recover their stock which is kinda low now

I don't want to get my hopes up, but already know they can have my money.

Can't wait, Witcher 3 was unparalleled

Hope it fails hard, fuck remakes.

Ohhhhhh totally gonna play this!

here's an idea: make Witcher 4 instead

To be fair, they are also working on the Witcher 4 in Unreal Engine 5.

It needs to be exactly the same with better graphics and sound design. I’m going to be very mad if they start covering up boobs, introduce some hamfisted woman protagonist or something along those lines.

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