With Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, a role-playing game with beautiful graphics has been released on Steam. However, unlike many other new games, this RPG does not rely on Unreal Engine 5, but on a product from Germany.
Which engine does Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 use? Unreal Engine 5 is used as the benchmark for impressive graphics in many new titles and immediately raises high expectations among players.
But Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 also looks fantastic and particularly impresses with its lush meadows and dense forests, which are realistically represented by CryEngine 5. The CryEngine from Frankfurt am Main, which started in 2006 with Far Cry, has been continuously developed and now poses a real competition to Unreal Engine 5.
In the trailer, you can see how Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 truly looks:
True Competition from Frankfurt
How strong is the competition from Germany? The example of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 shows that CryEngine also enables the development of graphically appealing games without compromising on performance. With a GeForce GTX 1060 as the minimum requirement for KCD 2, no player is excluded.
The director of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 explained why they chose not to use Unreal Engine 5: “Unreal Engine 5 is perfect for dry worlds, rocks, and deserts, but not for trees and dense vegetation,” he says in the Fantastický Podcast EP. 42 on YouTube.
The CryEngine particularly convinces with its ability to represent vegetation and realistic environments in detail, which distinguishes it in games like Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. It also offers a good balance between visual quality and performance, making it an attractive choice for developers.
Are there also monetary differences? There are also differences in licensing fees between the two engines. While developers using Unreal Engine 5 only have to pay a 5% royalty after a revenue of $1 million (via unrealengine.com), Crytek charges royalties for CryEngine starting from a revenue of $5,000 (via cryengine.com). For smaller developers who might not reach this threshold, it could be financially advantageous to opt for Unreal Engine.
Editor Alberto Lloria from 3DJuegos shares the opinion that the video game industry, with its rigid focus on Unreal Engine 5, may have taken a wrong turn. The current example of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 shows that the competition from Frankfurt am Main can keep up with the market leader and even have the edge in certain areas.
Lloria emphasizes that the game delivers impressive graphics by utilizing CryEngine 5 without sacrificing performance. To him, this is a clear sign that it is not always necessary to use the latest and most promoted engine to create a visual masterpiece. Why Unreal Engine 5 is so popular can be explained with 4 videos: 4 videos of the new Unreal Engine show us how fantastic gaming will look in the future
