381–390 of 628 posts
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UE5 can make a great and efficient game actually - its more about how you use it. And because its huge and popular and accessible there are a ton of developers using it very inefficiently. That can be true for any commodity software though. Designing something inhouse means you inherently will have engineers and experts with better low level understanding. It doesnt mean it will be better (could even be much worse) b…
Yes. You basically still need a few engine programmers to use UE5 efficiently, even if it's not your own engine. UE5 seems to be user friendly enough that most of the game development can be carried out just by artists and game designers, but without engine programmers performance optimization will be poor.
So a lot of studios think oh, the engine is already finished, we just need artists and designers to use it, all the heavy lifting has already been done. And while yes, you can make a game that way, the results will be sub optimal. But then again, free is infinitely cheaper than having an engine team maintaing your own engine or any custom elements of UE.
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I'm confused, do people want endless sequels or not?
The lesson of Nintendo is yes. Note that this is different in gaming than film because of technical progression. But also Nintendo are very good at "same charm, familiar characters and plot, different feel".
But they don't simply do roster updates, they bring those characters and worlds into new experiences, and they're willing to sit on good games rather than push out yearly new releases with almost nothing different compared to the previous iteration.
And the stability these franchises gives them, allows them to continue to make new IPs that may themselves grow into future tentpoles. So it's not just that they squander those successes, they are often trying to innovate into new things.
This hurts , in a very specific way. Those coders are legendary wizards of the craft, understanding engine design and systems architecture in a way nobody else in the industry does. This is a team that could get 200fps+ in their games with RT on and no dynamic reconstruction or upscaling to be had, at a time when everyone else mandated such shortcuts to have even 30-45fps at a similar resolution. They did all this wh…
I love that these teams are pushing boundaries of technology, but it also points to an issue with modern game AAA development. It's expensive to make these beautiful games and it's not like they are more enjoyable than games made cheaper.
I think we'll see stuff like this continue to happen over time. As a game company, having your own engine means that you have to be able to cultivate internal expertise in your tooling. Your employees will know this and could do bad things like ask for more money because they know that replacing them would significantly hurt productivity. Meanwhile, laying off your whole engine team and switching to UE5 means that yo…
I think we'll see stuff like this continue to happen over time. As a game company, having your own engine means that you have to be able to cultivate internal expertise in your tooling. Your employees will know this and could do bad things like ask for more money because they know that replacing them would significantly hurt productivity. Meanwhile, laying off your whole engine team and switching to UE5 means that yo…
For me this falls apart on the consumer side of things. UE5 games are manifestly lower quality than games built on custom engines. Optimization is especially worse. UE5's performance baseline _requires_ the use of upscalers (DLSS/FSR, fake/AI frames) in order to hit basic targets like 1080p@30fps. I won't buy games built on Unreal Engine. Homogeneity of this type is horrible for customers of the gaming sector.
I don't know exactly what you mean by "baseline", but the most recent UE5 game I've played that pretty consistently gets better than your "basic target" is The Last Caretaker (TLC). For me, it always did better than your target in the starting area, through to the point where you embark on your main quest. Prior to that, I played a whole lot of Satisfactory, which ran much, much better than TLC.
I run without AA, "upscaling", or frame hallucination. I'm using a Radeon RX 9070 on Linux, and spent most of my Satisfactory playtime with a Radeon 5700 XT.
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> Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel. The flat-ish shading and floaty physics of Unity is a particularly visible example of this. Ridiculous and provably false. It's like saying "every novel written with a typewriter tends to produce stories with a certain theme and dialog"
It isn’t like that, and it is true. Lots of games in a specific engine share common traits. From physics, to rendering, to more specific engine stuff (think of using the full suite of lumen/nanite/ue5 rendering whatever). Even the character actor can sometimes feel similar. Visuals are by far the most indicative thing of an engine. Don’t forget about unreal’s awful shader stutters. calling that ridiculous is extremel…
RIP to the end of an era. Was IdTech used outside of Id? Or was it just a Doom series thing as of recently?
Absolutely, the first versions until idTech 5 were open source and a number of important engines, like Source, derive from it. Wikipedia actually has a family tree that's broader than I remembered: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/Quake_-_... The CoD series, Source games (Half Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead), Titanfall, etc.
Source being based idTech is a pleasant surprise.
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Diablo also unionized and there's some representation in non-game teams like Battle.net. But I also know (I'm in games and in OC myself, loads of friends at local studios from SD, to OC, and LA counties) that they had a demonstration last Thursday, at 2PM Pacific Time they walked out. They claim that leadership is not negotiating in good faith.
Diablo is blizzard.
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All of them. Diablo is dead. They can't capitalize on StarCraft. All they have left with WoW is micro transactions for old users. Overwatch has been a disaster for years. Blizzard hasn't had a win in a very long time.
Diablo is currently in a bit of a resurgence, the latest expansion was quite good.