A new tech demo has appeared online showing what Cyberpunk 2077 could look like if rendered in Unreal Engine 5, and there’s absolutely no reason for the developers to use their own in-house tech at this point.
The tech demo, courtesy of Enfant Terrible, features a stunning reimagining of Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City that puts the original to shame. You can check out the tech demo below and see for yourself.
Enfant Terrible has some other rather impressive tech demos on its YouTube page, including videos imagining remakes of Red Dead Redemption and Dead Space as well as Mass Effect 4 in development. Each of them, along with the Cyberpunk 2077 demo, really showcase the power and potential of UE5.
Analysis: Seriously, why is anyone using anything other than Unreal Engine 5?
We certainly understand that a lot of studios feel valuable for their own in-house engines and technologies. They have worked very hard to produce them over the years and adapt them specifically to their type of game.
But it’s really pointless. In reality, studios don’t want to pay license fees to Epic Games to use the engine for the games they publish – and that’s a huge mistake. You can spend a substantial chunk of your budget building in-house tools and updating an aging game engine, or you can hand that money over to Epic.
You’re going to spend that money, and chances are your aging engine won’t look as good as Unreal Engine 5. Proof of that is in the demos we see game after game, or the recently viral train station demo which looks so realistic you’d mistake it for cellphone video until the mid-video twist.
That’s probably why Mass Effect 4 is going to be an Unreal Engine 5 game, and – given what we’ve seen – it’s all the more exciting because of it. It was announced last month that The Witcher 4 is also being developed in UE5, and it really makes us think about what could have been if Cyberpunk 2077 had been produced now instead of spending a decade in the hell of the development trying to squeeze the last bit of life out of REDengine. Maybe we’ll see in Cyberpunk 2078?