TL;DR: CDPR have opted to shutter their in-house engine, Red Engine (which CP2077 was built on) in favour of a partnership with Unreal. Most of their devs have now switched to Unreal; with only those left on the upcoming CP2077 release still using Red Engine 4.
They have opted to no longer work at all on the Red Engine projects; ergo they either port CP to Unreal (an incomprehensibly large task given that Unreal doesn’t support many features that Red does, or at least not in the way Red does - not a slight on Unreal, simple reality of different engines, especially internal vs external tooling), or cease further development of CP.
They opted for the latter.
A shame, though. I remember them saying there will be more DLCs. To be fair, in their first teaser they said they'll release when it's ready which they also failed to do.
Part of me thinks/hopes they also aren't putting too much attention on it because they want their upcoming games to be more on the quality level of witcher 3 than CP2077. At least I hope.
I guess potentially they will be able to make a Cyberpunk 2077 sequel on Unreal Engine maybe called Cyberpunk 2078: Edgerunner Boogaloo (CDPR I am available to join your team, get in touch).
I know precisely the square root of fuck all when it comes to game design but presuming they can at least map across assets as they will already have the character designs, language, city design etc all sorted so hopefully they will be starting from a lot further forward than CB2077 years ago.
Some of that is probably reusable, such as the concept material. But when it comes to assets themselves, that's a different story. Sometimes red tape prevents migrating assets from one game onto its sequels, meaning they may need to remake a somewhat different version of the assets.
I'm doing one more playthrough once PL comes out. I may not even get the DLC, but the enhanced mechanics that come in the update to the base game should be interesting. Perhaps closer to what was in my mind at launch (and yes, I enjoyed the game then anyway).
Logically this is a solid move for them, but I always hate to see more games on Unreal. Consolidation of the industry into one engine is not good overall, and any company that still works with its own engine I have a lot of respect for.
This is a great point. Gamers as a whole should not really want every game ever to be on UE, not because it's a bad engine, but a) it's owned by Epic, and b) that's fucking boring.
I just hope they resolve the crashing issues before putting it to bed. I love Cyberpunk, but the game crashes frequently on PS5. We’re talking 3-5 times per session.
Considering getting it on PC and cloud transferring saves over. Is it stable on PC?
If you have a good oc it's stable. Tbh I didn't know what the fuss was about day one, I had a great experience. Then I learned it's because red engine was horribly optimized and I just had enough power for it. (I had been saving for a new PC just for cyberpunk)
My hardware is modest (GTX 1660, Ryzen 5… I wanna say 3600?, 32GB RAM, NVMe storage), and realistically I’d probably play it primarily on my Steam Deck. I don’t need ray tracing - never used it on PS5 because it was that or 60FPS - but framerates are important. Deck’s probably not gonna keep a stable 40 FPS but if I’m playing on my PC I would expect it to run at a stable 60 at 1080p.