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[shikamaru317]

Ryuu96 said:

shikamaru317 said:

I edited in my thoughts on Avowed after you quoted so I will post them again here:

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.

That's what I mean, yeah.

I've been thinking about this since Dead Island 2. I was a bit put off by hubs instead of open world but it works brilliant and performs amazing and I always hear about open world issues with Unreal Engine so I've been thinking lately about Avowed and whether it will be Open-World or Large HUBs.

Idk if it was ever confirmed if it was fully moving onto Unreal Engine 5, I hope they have though. Obsidian aren't the best with tech too, Lol. So I'd rather they go with whatever is easier for them.

I'd be fine with multiple large hubs instead of one huge open world is what I'm getting at, I wonder what it will be though. If it's Unreal Engine 5 though then the World Partitioning should help Obsidian a lot and maybe remove the need to create hubs.

Yeah, it was never confirmed that Avowed switched from UE4 to UE5, but around the same time multiple Obsidian VFX artists and programmers updated their LinkedIn's with information about using Unreal 5 on Avowed, for instance Obsidian Lead VFX Artist Aaron Dubois updated his with "Lead VFX artist on Avowed. Working with Niagara fx in unreal 5". It definitely feels like they switched engines when the partial reboot happened and the game director changed from Chris Parker to Carrie Patel back in 2021. Guessing they kept alot of the story, art design, voice acting, soundtrack, and gameplay from the initial Chris Parker build, but started rebuilding the game world and character models in Unreal 5, which would explain the delay on the game, it began development in 2018 and is looking to be an 2024 release, 6 years is an unusually long dev cycle for Obsidian, who have managed to release games in as little as 18 months in the past, the partial reboot and engine switch rumors go a long way towards explaining why the dev cycle is so long on Avowed.

Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 04 May 2023