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.

PC for me. Or board/card games maybe.

But as others said, they're not abandoning hardware. Said it years ago it's still important part of their Game Pass strategy.

No, Redfall's issues are clearly 95% on Arkane. What I mean is that they probably couldn't get help from ID Software because it's a different engine than they're used to. However, I am a bit concerned for Avowed if it is fully open-world because a few issues are due to Unreal Engine 4.

I feel like or thought it was common knowledge that Unreal Engine isn't the best for Open-Worlds? Stuff like Pop-In, etc. Additionally it's a lot behind even Creation Engine, it's only now with Unreal Engine 5 that they're adding World Partitioning, something which Creation Engine has used in their Open-Worlds for years.

There's some good examples listed there which work but IIRC Ghostwire Tokyo, Days Gone, Conan Exiles, Biomutant all had technical issues, as does Jedi Survivor, I often hear people blame Unreal Engine for these issues. Borderlands 3 also had performance issues and The Outer Worlds is Hub Based, not Open-World and the Hubs aren't that large.

Dead Island 2 went Hub-Based instead of Open-World and is one of the best performing titles this year, Lol. Ark 2 will run like shit too.

A lot of developers are moving to Unreal Engine 5 so hopefully they've fixed the issues it has with large Open-Worlds but it remains to be seen, that may not mean anything for Avowed though if it's running Unreal Engine 4. I'd also wonder if it also contributed to Playground choosing Forzatech over Unreal Engine for Fable.

Sawyer's comments on Creation.

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.

Heck, I wonder if maybe it would be a consideration to move Obsidian over to Creation Engine now that they're under the same umbrella.

Only issue is that it may make hiring a bit complicated but if Obsidian ever ends up doing another Fallout they'll be doing it on Creation Engine.

The Outer Worlds would work on Creation Engine and may boost sales a little more on PC.

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.

People really don't give Creation Engine enough credit. Just cause it's a bit ugly and Bethesda titles are buggy but they're buggy because they're fucking massive with millions of physical interactions

It's a bit like I was saying earlier, there is really NO RPG out there which feels like a Bethesda RPG. They're unique, nothing comes close to scratching that itch.

Would be cool to see Obsidian do some stuff in Creation Engine again.

The Creation Engine is really good... That's really why the Fallout/Elder Scrolls out there are so popular. You can do SO much stuff in those games and this 100% because of the engine. Yes, you give up on some really high-end graphic stuff that you could do with Unreal (or similar) for it or you encounter probably more bugs, but the gameplay options, world interaction, etc, are just amazing :)

Exactly! There's a reason why Bethesda open world games haven't been recreated by anyone else