Honestly I think blaming Redfall's issues on Unreal 4 is a bit of a copout. Redfall's open world isn't particularly large, we have seen Unreal 4 used on larger open worlds than Redfall with much better results. I don't think the engine itself is to blame, Arkane clearly just weren't familiar with it, most of their dev team previously worked on games like Dishonored Death of the Outsider (Void Engine, an Arkane customized version of id Tech 5) and Prey (Cry Engine), they just didn't have experience with Unreal Engine heading in and clearly never asked Zenimax or Xbox for help until it was too late.
Plenty of devs have made Unreal 4 work for open world games (Sea of Thieves, Hogwarts Legacy, Ghostwire Tokyo, Days Gone, Conan Exiles, Biomutant, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, etc.) or games with multiple fairly large maps (Kingdom Hearts 3, Blue Protocol, Borderlands 3, Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, FF7 Remake, The Outer Worlds, PUBG, etc.), and many of them did so while pulling off better graphics and/or performance than Arkane Austin managed on Redfall. Many more devs are using Unreal 5 on their upcoming games with a single open world map (the next Witcher game or Ark 2 for instance) or with multiple fairly large maps (Mass Effect 4 and Black Myth: Wukong for instance). I don't think we can truly say that Unreal is bad for games with larger map sizes, it seems to be at least above average for larger map sizes or else so many devs wouldn't be using it for games with larger maps. I mean CD Projekt is straight up abandoning their own Red Engine to use Unreal 5 on the next Witcher, while Bioware is abandoning DICE's Frostbite to use Unreal 5 on Mass Effect 4.
I can't say I'm particularly worried about Avowed, for starters Jez saw the initial build before the partial reboot in 2021 and said it already looked great on Unreal 4, when the reboot happened they switched to Unreal 5 which is an even more capable engine based on what we have seen from it. Secondly, Obsidian has Unreal engine experience already from developing The Outer Worlds and Grounded on Unreal 4, unlike Arkane Austin who seemed to have alot less devs at the studio who were familiar with Unreal engine development, and they are under Booty's 1st party division which means they can more easily ask for help from the Unreal master developers at The Coalition and Ninja Theory if they start to struggle. Thirdly, we don't know if the current build of Avowed after the 2021 reboot is fully open world or has multiple smaller but still large maps and fast travel for getting between them, they may be going for multiple maps to better portray the large world where Pillars of Eternity and Avowed are set and it's multiple unique regions with different climates, flora, and fauna. I think Avowed will end up looking pretty darn good, especially if they make use of some of Unreal 5's features such as Lumen lightning and Unreal 5's large free library of high res Nanite textures.
Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 04 May 2023
