this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2024
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The problem with Unreal Engine is (and always has been) that Epic makes the engine to make the game they're currently working on. So right now it is a Fortnite engine. Previously it was a Gears of War engine. (Maybe throw Paragon in between.) It started out as the engine for Unreal Tournament.
So if you want to take that engine and start making a different type of game, it's not necessarily going to have the tools you need. It's not necessarily even going to do what you need it to do at the base engine level. Not that it couldn't, but Epic doesn't give a shit. So they give you all the source code and support for building your own version of the engine so you can add the features you need.
You want to make a vast, persistent, open world with vast dungeons you can enter and explore? Yeah you're going to have to build support for that in the engine yourself. You want to do it without loading screens? Better get deep into that engine code. You want to have vehicles or mounts? NPCs, companions, AI enemies? When they hadn't added them to Fortnite yet, totally up to you to figure out, and probably through modifying the engine. Need to make major rendering improvements? Better dig in. Problems with the art pipeline lacking features you need
Every time you touch engine code, that's new tech debt. If a new version of the engine comes out, you have to integrate the changes. The longer the project goes on, the harder that becomes. Then Epic finally comes out with the feature you built yourself (say vehicles) but its only partly the way you did it. Now you're fucked and you have to decide right there: strip out your changes, switch to theirs and redo most of your work, or, stop taking engine upgrades and integrate new features piecemeal. Now you're in tech debt hell.
Almost every developer starts off with saying, "we'll use the engine as is, no engine changes allowed!" Three months later the cynical director is having a high level meeting about allowing a major feature get implemented in engine code. But it will be alright, they tell themselves. 3-5 years later they're up to their eyeballs in tech debt of engine changes, and realizing Amazing Game 2 either needs to be built using the old version of the engine they're stuck on from 2-4 years ago, or built from the ground up on a new version of the engine.
I'd be thinking long and hard before switching to UE5 if I were Bethesda. And they have the advantage of having access to some of the best Unreal Engine developers in the world (Obsidian, The Coalition) now that they're part of Microsoft. They're also probably getting a bunch of pressure to make the change as the studios create a corps of experts.
If I were them I would be very tempted to make the necessary changes to Creation Engine, and stay far, far away from Unreal. Sacrifice a year or two and your top engine devs to overhaul the pain points of Creation Engine, keep full control of your pipelines and versioning, and make the game you want to make, not the one Epic wants you to make. You can even make awesome DLC or a smaller sequel game on the old branched engine while the overhaul takes place, and just have a small core team working out the kinks on the new system.
I guess my point is, tech debt is not the point, because there will always be tech debt. It's a much bigger decision than that.
They don't make the engine to make that game. They make the game to prove out that they didn't miss something egregious in building the engine; or, "eat their own dog food". It has gained features over a long period of time that would fit common use cases from other developers, regardless of what Epic has built.
Meanwhile, nothing will convince me that Bethesda's tech stack is worth keeping.
The overall point still stands though. No off the shelf engine will have all the features a game needs unless the game is staying within the bounds of what the engine already covers.
At this point, switching engines means a hell of a lot of work only to eventually end up exactly where they are now again.
It's a legitmate question without an easy anwser, as to whether that work is better spent moving to a new engine or improving the existing one.
Unfortunately the path Bethesda is seeming to go with is to do neither. I can't imagine making a game like Starfield and not at least trying to find a way to make more of those loading moments "invisible" to the player rather than full on "yank you out" loading screens.
If that's the overall point, it was nested in several worse points. The problem is that they're still using the same tech, and switching to Unreal is the fastest path between two points in time that anyone can propose. Really, they should have been working on a new engine after reviews criticized them for it in Fallout 4 back in 2015.
In terms of the overall point, I was talking about Unreal specifically. If it makes you understand better that all engines are geared toward specific game features, great, read it that way. However, you still don't seem to understand that UE5 isn't the right engine out-of-the-box for every game. So even if I buried that, and now it's clear, you're still in denial.
You keep saying it, but at the scale of games Bethesda makes it isn't simply a fact that switching engines will be faster or easier. Even switching a code base from UE3 to UE4, or UE4 to UE5 wasn't/isn't a simple task (I've done it, I know.) Completely switching engines means you're losing almost everything. You simply don't seem to understand the scale of work entailed with moving major features from one engine to another. Or for maintaining features in an engine you don't have full control of. I've done that too.
You've already said that you can't be convinced otherwise though, so clearly you think you're smarter than them, despite their deep knowledge of what they're making.
I'm not saying they made all the best choices (or that they will going forward), but being flippant about the obviousness of the choice, and saying it is simply faster to switch engines demonstrates serious lack of knowledge and experience in the matter.
You're arguing points that I haven't made. I haven't said that Unreal is best out of the box for every game. I haven't said that switching engines is easy. It's hard. They should have bitten the bullet and done the hard thing by now. It doesn't have to be Unreal, but for the sake of the quality of their future titles, it can't be what they're using now. Given that they still haven't made the switch yet, it means we've all got an incredibly long wait until we can expect them to put out a game that has a level of quality we'd expect from other modern games.
They shouldn't, if they're going to be an engine company. But anything that isn't for keeping Fortnite pulling in billions of dollars is secondary.
Gained and lost. Very basic things necessary to make all the new features work with anything "not Fortnite" were missing when UE5 was released. It absolutely released as an engine for making Fortnite type games and everything else was/is an afterthought. You either had to make atrocious work arounds, engine changes, or wait for stuff to be fixed/added, delaying your project.
Do you have inside knowledge? UE5 isn't the be-all end-all of game engines. Not everyone should switch to it. And frankly, as gamers and devs, we desperately need a good competitor to show up soon. Epic is gaining way too much control over our experiences.
They were an engine company for two decades before Fortnite, and it has tons of features that game never uses.
I have used Unreal but not Gamebryo/Creation, and I don't think I need inside knowledge to see how far behind the best output of the latter engine is from its peers. Unreal is not the end-all, but it allows a company to switch to a new engine more quickly than building one themselves, and in this case, their sister company, Obsidian, has already built an imitation of Bethesda style RPGs in Unreal.
With any luck, REX will be that competitor. But also, quite frankly, so few companies can afford to make a game that pushes graphical boundaries and the latest technology that I'd rather champion Godot.
We have yet to see the modding capabilities of Obsidian games, but Outer Worlds had nothing.
It is a great game don't get me wrong, but Bethesda's writing has been subpar since Oblivion, so losing mods would be horrible for them.
I'm hoping Godot becomes a serious competitor but I'm also thinking CryEngine 6 might be a true UE5 competitor. It's basically the WIP engine for Hunt Showdown and Crysis 4.
Agree. Unreal engine use in BG3?
Baldur's Gate 3 is built on the Divinity Engine.
Oh thank you.
You just reminded me of the plague that was UE3 for MMOs in the 10s, they couldn't have many players on screen, and so much texture streaming it's unreal (heh).
Have you done game dev? Have you ever used Ue5?
Yes. AA/AAA dev with UE3, UE4, UE5 and several proprietary engines. I've even contributed to Unreal Engine code with bug fixes.