In a recent interview, Redfall creative director Harvey Smith revealed why the upcoming shooter will be running on Unreal Engine 4 rather than the more recent and feature-packed Unreal Engine 5.
Speaking with Wccftech, Smith explained that the release of Unreal Engine 5 didn’t align well with the development of Redfall, essentially coming out in the middle of the game’s development cycle.
“Halfway through the project, Epic came up with Unreal Engine 5, but the game is based on Unreal Engine 4.26,” said Smith. “If we had more time, we would have probably gone with UE5, but it was a lot of work just upgrading to 4.26.”
Game development is often quite challenging, and while Epic Games tried its best to make the transition from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5 as easy as possible for developers, the decision to change engines in the middle of development still takes quite a bit of time and effort.
In the same interview, Smith also referred to Redfall as the “most supported game” when it comes to post-launch content for Arkane titles.