Over the last few years, games have become a lot better at hiding loading screens. Take the most recent God of War games, for example, which famously concealed loading screens through the use of natural gameplay elements.
For the vast Cyberpunk 2077 with its dense, multi-layered map, it was commonly thought that the ‘elevator sections’, such as in the opening segment where you took a lift to a penthouse, were there to, once again, hide loading screens. However, according to the game’s cinematic director, Igor Sarzynski, that was incorrect as CD Projekt Red’s “miracle” in-house Red Engine didn’t need to mask anything. In fact, these longer segments were there because they just “make sense”.
“[The] elevator is there because it makes sense,” he posted on Bluesky. “We could make it transparent if we wanted. This engine is a miracle. I will not accept slander.” Sarzynsk, who is serving as the creative director on the Cyberpunk sequel, aka “Project Orion”, wrote: “Mini rant: no, elevators in cyberpunk are not ‘cleverly concealed loading screens’. You really think you can traverse the whole city and enter a huge complex interior with no loading screens, but we need to do elevator tricks to load a penthouse?”
Why CD Projekt Red is Switching to Unreal Engine 5
Despite the high praise for Red Engine, which also powered The Witcher 3, the studio decided to move away from it, instead opting to use Unreal Engine 5 for their upcoming “Cyberpunk 2” and The Witcher 4. The move obviously left some fans concerned, given just how brilliant Red Engine has been for both the Witcher and (eventually) Cyberpunk 2077. However, CDPR revealed the switch will allow them to work on more projects at once, rather than the previously “very one-sided” approach.
“The way we built stuff in the past was very one-sided, like one project at a time,” CDPR’s vice president of technology, Charles Tremblay, told Eurogamer last year. “We pushed the limit – but also we saw that if we wanted to have a multi-project at the same time, building in parallel, sharing technology together, it is not easy.”
Tremblay also confirmed that the move to Unreal had nothing to do with the initial performance issues that plagued Cyberpunk 2077 when it first launched. He added: “The first thing I want to say again, to be sure, 100 percent clear, is that the whole team, myself included, are extremely proud of the engine we built for Cyberpunk. So it is not about, ‘This is so bad that we need to switch’ and, you know, ‘Kill me now’ – that is not true. That is not true, and this is not why the decision was made to switch.”
