Crystal Dynamics: Taking the Heroic Leap from a Proprietary Engine to UE5 | Unreal Fest 2022

When something is built for you, it can be hard to let it go. In this panel discussion, we’ll focus on the challenges and immediate upsides to switching to UE5. And since the panel is pretty game-agnostic, any developer can get something out of this.

[Xero_Wolf]

Wow this is a big leap in deed. As a gamer and game dev enthusiast I have really appreciated the massive amount of time and energy CD had invested into their engine. On the other had I practically grew up playing around with and modding games with unreal engine so I can certainly understand the move to it by the Crystal team.

[ZiggyStardust]

The Tomb Raider reboot for Xbox 360 and PS3 in 2013 was a technically really impressive game. That's also true for Rise of the Tomb Raider for Xbox 360, that was ported by Nixxes.

[TheScure]

Crystal truly had an old engine. I remember playing TR Anniversary on Geforce 4 MX440 (DirectX7 GPU!) and that was in 2007. The game barely used advanced shaders. If you check Angel of Darkness, there are reflections, cube maps, bump mapping, different real-time shadows, specular lights, Depth of Field, lightmaps all rendered in the same scene and that's 2003!

They surely put a lot of effort into it for TR2013, because that game run well and looked very good. But i'm sure it was time to switch to UE5 now.