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Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
521–530 of 628 posts
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#522Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#523[flagged]
First of all, we're talking about Doom here. I doubt Doom is too alienating for heterosexual audiences. Doesn't that seem like an extremely inorganic segue into identity politics? Secondly, The "go woke or broke" thing has been a Schrodinger's mantra used by grifters to sell outrage. Everything is woke until it succeeds, and then suddenly it was always predetermined to succeed. The market, on the whole, doesn't seem…
> says more about the content you consume
i can say the exact same for you and take a guess as to what your political leanings are but to be polite i'll leave it alone and agree to disagree
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#524Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of this is true and has been true for decades in the game industry. The other side of this seesaw is: Games are fundamentally in the novelty business. Players like some amount of familiarity, but they want new experiences. 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…
> Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel There's a degree of toupee fallacy to this. It's hard to tell what engine something is on just from gameplay if the team invested in custom rendering and gamefeel.
Perfect term for it. We can all spot the UE games that look like UE games. Same goes for people who are confident about being able to spot AI.
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#525Too much boomer nostalgia about iD. I get it I am old too but people need to understand that the world moves on.
The glory days of iD are long, long gone and Microsoft needs to start making some goddamn money on Xbox. And iD hasn't been pulling their weight.
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#526Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel. I think this is a bit of a myth. Unreal gets this criticism a lot, but it's usually because many studios choose to stick close to the rendering defaults, which does lead to a certain look. To that point, it's probably a lot cheaper to configure Unreal or Unity into a unique "grain" than it is to develop your…
If anyone wants a concrete example of this, Pikmin 4 uses Unreal!
So does Ace Combat 7. Not exactly an FPS.
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#527Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Hi-Fi Rush and Guilty Gear Strive are both Unreal Engine games and they look nothing like a "standard Unreal look" being both highly stylised.
Guilty Gear and Hi-Fi Rush are both Unreal 4 games and a lot of the comments in this thread are about the Lumen+Nanite ‘grain’ that seems very present in Unreal 5.
I certainly think there is was inflection point for Unreal’s inherent complexity moving to 5 that made it exponentially more difficult to customize when compared to 4 as far as implementing highly customized renderers (in particular) and overall customization in general.
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is that MS is spending a crap ton of money to produce a product that is marginally better gameplay wise than a game like DUSK, which was made by a few people (I actually liked DUSK more but this isn't a game review thread). Not every game should be made on the cheap, but these game studios do cost a lot of money and suffer from diminishing returns. For how expensive these games are to make, they should be c…
A software company with less than 500 employees and more than 100 MUSD in annual revenue and you're asking me to please think of the vulture capitalists that gutted it?
If every employee makes 100k (let's say that's an average. Some make more, some make less). That 50m in salary alone, not including benefits like 401k or health insurance. And that's just people costs. Doom dark ages sold somewhere between 800k-1m is the estimate. At 70$ a copy they might not have broken even if the lower end of the sales target is what was hit if you take into account benefits and people buying the game on sale.
I'm not saying to sympathize with the MS, but they blew a lot of money on a worse game than doom eternal or 2016 doom. It's just not penciling out I guess.
Game companies are always going through this and the only way to stay around a long time is to stay lean (like valve) and/or find a really lucrative business model.
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#529Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there is another benefit of a custom engine — you built it to fit your workflow, so you could be extremely productive with all kinds of tools built specifically for this workflow. UE or Unity do not consider your specific cases. The problem is that companies are not willing to groom new engineers to get familiar with the code.
UE is also just not a good engine. If you reduce "what is a 3D game engine" really hard it is "framework for running an input-process-output loop while consistently rendering audio and video". UE fails at the latter (factually unfixable shadder stuttering issues). A pragmatist might consider the taxonomy and say UE is therefore not a game engine. Unreal seems to be a great framework for assembling and generating cont…
Or maybe...it is a good engine when configured and used properly, and many developers don't take the time to learn how to do so. There are plenty of UE games that don't have shader stuttering issues because there are plenty of things you can do to avoid shader stuttering.
UE-powered games collectively earn 20+ billion worldwide annually each year. Unity-powered games also earn 20+ billion annually. This means that each year these "bad" game engines power more revenue than every YCombinator company combined.
Meanwhile, idTech, however technically amazing it may be, is so complicated to develop for that even id Software doesn't use it for every game.
Re: Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software
#530I 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…
> It lets you treat your employees as a replaceable commodity that can be scaled up and down as it makes monetary sense rather than a cohesive team of skilled artisans.
Movies are made by a temporary team of skilled artisans who are masters of their craft. After the project, they move one. Games seem to fit within the same creative category as movies. So I wouldn't expect a company with a fixed set of artisans.