A thought I had yesterday playing Starfield, sighing with frustration as janky, broken system after janky, broken system sucked the fun out of my session…
All these different game devs, pouring all these funds & resources / hours into each creating their own special little bespoke game systems, mostly I assume to avoid paying licensing fees to Unity / Unreal. Imagine if they all pooled their resources and knowhow into making one stable, insanely-powerful, insanely-well-funded engine with limitless creative possibilities.
Starfield looks like a game from 10 years ago. Shitty character animations and weird-looking ‘people’. CDPR are, imo, making the smart decision moving over to Unreal for future games. It works, it looks fantastic, it’s very stable. More money and resources to put into the actual process of game dev rather than reinventing the wheel each time.
I don't think you'd ever want an engine level monopoly to that degree, even Unreal isn't by itself capable of the systems that allow Starfield to work the way it does, and would require serious modifications to do so, and not every studio would perform those modifications necessary to complete their game's vision, and then just give all of that to everyone else to piggyback off of for free, there are a lot of reasons to not do that, specifically, what Unity is doing now.
It only seems cool to do that with Unreal because they haven't pulled anything like Unity... yet. Not having done that yet doesn't preclude them from doing it, that's the scary thing about the Unity debacle, anyone engine could turn around and make a horrible change, we just have to trust that they won't, and being given monopoly power makes it too tempting to trust forever.
Nothing about Starfield is that amazing that you couldn’t replicate it in something like Unreal or even Unity.
Graphics are dead easy on either. Exploration is faked, it’s fast travel to a procedural terrain/level, with a few hand made destinations in between, nothing hard. Modular ship design? Simple. FPS RPG system, simple. Physics engines already exist, storing the location of player placed objects is trivial.
What exactly about Starfield makes you think an engine would need serious modifications for a SF-like game?
Check out my reply to the other person who asked the same thing, it's more of a thought experiment of the limitations of OP's idea that all studios could use one engine to accomplish any game. Starfield features some mechanics and systems that are almost vestigial at this point to the engine, but don't exist inherently in Unreal.
Unreal isn’t by itself capable of the systems that allow Starfield to work the way it does, and would require serious modifications to do so
Can you back that up? Nothing I’ve seen of Starfield indicates it couldn’t be done in UE.
Please check out Angels Fall First and Renegade X, they’re made with Unreal Engine 3 and are not AAA titles, so they can give you a glimpse of what even older versions of UE can do.
I'm talking about the Creation/Gamebryo specific sets of mechanics like NPC schedules and the radiant AI or quest systems, those specific things that needed to be created that aren't inherent in the engine. Not that Starfield is really the best show for those anymore, not by a long shot, it's more of just an example of a limitation of OP's idea of all devs using one engine.
Developers could all use Unreal, but if someone wanted to make Oblivion on Unreal they'd have to program and create those systems and mechanics because they don't just "come with the engine". If they made those, and all devs use Unreal, should they be folded into Unreal for future devs to use? Should Unreal program those mechanics or something similar for future devs to use? At what point does it become too complex to bolt on certain systems to an existing engine instead of make one explicitly for it, depending on the type of game?
I don't have a great example for a game so novel in its execution that it would be truly limited by Unreal, because that engine is absolutely powerful, it's more thinking about what would happen in a world with a single engine monopoly. Some studios would end up with their own proprietary offshoot modded engines like all the engines that spawned out of modified Quake engines back in the day, for instance, goldsrc.
It only seems cool to do that with Unreal because they haven’t pulled anything like Unity… yet
Good point. Though, you’d hope they would’ve looked at the current Unity debacle and thought “fuck that for a game of soldiers”, the backlash was resounding and rightly so.
Not sure if I offended some Bethesda fanboys or my idea sound too much like communism but people don’t seem to like it haha.
Starfield is basically a game that's impossible to have an unbiased discussion on. Just by criticizing it you paint a target on your back, and same for when I praise it, though it does have a lot of flaws. I think for the Creation engine in particular it's not only about dodging royalties from using another engine, it's about what they've already put into that engine, and how comfortable the team already is working on it, and the proprietary parts of it that allow for the modding community, console command knowledge, and radiant systems to come along into new Bethesda games.
I would be quite interested to see them attempt working with a new engine and getting over the speed bump of adding these specific systems and implementations into a new engine that works better to begin with, but only time will tell when they finally find that worth it.
Don’t worry. They’ll turn them into live-service games with repetitive content and immersion-breaking cosmetic micro-transactions. You’ll grind through the same few stealth levels with some barely random enemy permutations marketed as “infinite open world content”. Your coop partner will be someone dressed in red cargo shorts, a purple mohawk wig, and a weapon that has so many random attachments on it you can’t figure out whether it’s a microscope, a dildo, or a sniper rifle.
This comment is true for so many games nowadays it’s getting annoying.
I got WWZ recently for some reason and holy shit.
It had been a while since I had regret buying a game.
Same. At least with Deus Ex I have some hope left. Iirc the studio (Eidos?) was sold by Square Enix and the new owner may have them work on a new Deus Ex.
If you like those kind of games it may also interest you that Dishonored 3 being planned was part of the leaks last week.
So make something new. Microsoft is in desperate need of defining series rather than Halo and Gears of War, both of which are the types of games he’s criticizing here.
Some researchers did a study several years ago and found that adding a virtual nose decreased motion sickness significantly. However, I don’t think I’ve seen any developers try this. I wonder if it’d help.
Have they discovered a link between people with big noses and less motion sickness? Imo these are the more important questions that will drive humanity forward
Yes although I’m hypothesising large nose peoples brains will be doing this with a larger area hence the greater effects against motion sickness. It could lead to novel treatments for motion sickness like wearing a big nose while riding on a bus.
Honestly even the very best VR-only games are only interesting because they are in VR.
Half-Life: Alyx is IMO still the best of those and it can be played outside of VR thanks to mods… But in that case it’s a curiosity, not an actual good traditional game.
HLA in VR is incredible though and I wish there were more games like it.
Alyx absolutely broke that mould for me. it started off good but built up to incredible as it progressed. I just wish more developers would do similarly. But then this article is the reason why they don’t
I don’t have problems with VR. I sold my Quest 2 cos there are not games like Alyx, which I enjoyed a lot, and that’s a pity. I see it going the way of 3D.
I didn’t see a source for the statistic in the article which is a bit disappointing as I’m really interested to learn more about it. It seems pretty high but also there’s quite a lot of uncertainty built into it.
From my experience with VR I found I got sick after a long enough time but was able to get my ‘vr legs’ and have much longer sessions even on more intense games like Windlands where you swing around like Spiderman (super fun if you have the stomach for it).
The other thing to note is that for me at least it’s a spectrum. It’s not just ‘VR makes me sick’ but it depends a lot of the game or activity and there are a bunch of ways for games to try and reduce it. It does take time to get used to some of them though.
Hopefully things become better with time and more folks get to enjoy it because it’s a lot of fun in my experience.
Yea, some games I can play for hours.
Others make me feel weird after a few minutes.
I can spend a ton of time in Alyx, or doing barrel rolls and corkscrews in Star Wars Squadrons.
I have a hard time finishing a level in After the Fall.
I have had a lot of friends over and try it and since they are making up their statics I will do a statistic purely based of my experience. About 5% of VR triers experience nausea when the frame rate isn’t smooth in a moment of movement.
Jet Island was the game for me that grew my VR legs, Windlands sounds similar except you also have Ironman thrusters and a skate board. After that I could then spend hours in dirt rally 2.0 which poetically would’ve gave me a bad headache before.
I don’t think VR is going to work for us. My SO and I get carsick really easily, and my SO gets sick playing or watching FPS games on a normal screen. It’s mitigated somewhat by adjusting FOV and higher refresh, but it still causes issues within an hour (usually like 30 min).
I wonder how much of this statistics are from people like us, for whom even “tame” things like being a passenger in a car can cause motion sickness.
Even if the sickness issue is solved at some point I just don’t ever see VR become a dominant way to game. There are just too many downsides.
Story-focussed games can not direct you where to look. You are completely cut off from the world so you can’t e.g. watch a child or elderly relative while you use it or chat with friends while you work using it. Environments need a lot more work for a smaller market share if you can look at them from any angle. Hardware is much more expensive (and always will be) compared to a system that just needs to render a screenful of content at the same quality level. Your UI options are more limited if you want to keep things immersive.
Exactly, and that’s why we don’t have one. Maybe I’ll get one when my kids are a little older, but for now, it’s a lot more fun to experience things together than to have someone completely closed off in a VR world.
Even if I didn’t have kids, I still probably wouldn’t want it because I’d like to spend that time with my spouse, and looking at an avatar just isn’t the same.
I think the entire line of thinking that you need a first person perspective to be immersed in a game or virtual world is also flawed. As someone who has been on Second Life for more than 16 years now which uses neither VR equipment nor a first person camera 90% of the time I can certainly “feel like I am there” despite all of those factors and in the presence of many other factors that do not exist in RL like teleporting and camming through walls just fine.
Is that ever claimed anywhere? AFAIK, VR has just been marketed as a new way to experience a virtual world, not as the only way to be immersed in a virtual world.
I think VR would be really cool, but it just doesn’t seem to fit with my lifestyle at this point. And I’m not sure if I would be able to handle it since I and my spouse get motion sick quite easily.
Where does that statistic come from and why is the range so broad? I also don’t think it’s a big deal because even if you do get motion sick, after playing enough you don’t get motion sick anymore. (people in the vr community call it getting your vr legs)
There are definitely games that make me more suck than others. But even the "good ones" are kinda weird. Like I can't imagine playing a vr game for an hour or so. That's why i don't even bother anymore
Yeah. I can play Thrill of the Fight with no nausea after several matches. I also didn’t get sick from Vader Immortal or other games like Beat Saber or Crisis VRigade. Games where you move in-game but stay still in real life though, I feel like throwing up after a short time.
minecraft gives me simulation sickness. Time 30 minutes and i’m done. The interesting part here is how it started doing it suddenly; i take a pause from videogames in general and now i’m even less used to full 3d. So hey, i can’t see myself using vr.
I prefer AR over VR. AR can do tons of things, and you are aware of your surroundings too.
Though, for gaming, VR makes more sense, but I don’t see it becoming dominant way of playing games any time soon. Maybe when we reach the point of full-body immersion like Matrix, or Sword Art Online.
I don't think it'll be a dominant form really. It's a more immersive method, but not many games will need that. Even for me that is still thinking about picking one up, I mostly am looking at using it for seated cockpit play.
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