It makes sense. It would be pretty costly to train everyone there on a new engine and tweak the new engine enough to play nice with the kind of games they want to make.
I mean it is, but it might be less costly than continuing on the proprietary engine. CD Projekt and Halo both cut their losses and moved to UE5 as a compromise moving forward .
If CD Projekt, creators of one of the best RPGs of the last 20 years, thinks they can benefit from an engine switch I’m inclined to think they might be right.
The problem with Halo is that 343 didn't keep a lot of the people that actually knew how to use the Blam/Slipspace engine. They didn't want Bungie employees working there. So of course they were going to switch to Unreal. Now Halo is going to have the same bad performance problems all the other games that use Unreal have been having lately.
A big benefit of using a proprietary game engine is that the development studio does not need to pay a yearly fee per person for a game engine license every year that a game is in development. That gets very expensive very quickly. Both 343 and CD Projekt have a lot more money behind them now than they did 10 years ago, so they must think the huge financial loss is somehow going to please investors. Because at the end of the day, for both companies its all about pleasing the investors, not gamers.
Not better, but they are different kinds or RPG.
Both are open world action RPGs yes, but CDPR makes highly story driven games when Bethesda makes sandbox style RPGs where the story is only framing all the mechanics and possibilities.
In Bethesda games I can roleplay my characters, in The Witcher I can roleplay as Gerald.