Others answered but it’s easier/cheaper for them to use a vendor’s engine. It makes sense.
What sucks is that UE seems to almost have a monopoly on engine leasing. I wish there were more options. Having all games use the same engine is putting too many eggs in the same basket.
They claimed that it was expensive and was part of the reason for cyberpunk’s turbulent launch.
It’s a real shame though, most UE5 runs awful it seems, and are still limited by single thread performance, unlike RED Engine which scales far better with more CPU cores.
Tbh RED engine also has its plethora of problems, missing features, and makes it harder to onboard new team members (need to train on new engine instead of basically every single dev having experience with unity or unreal).
Aside from doing the work to maintain and update your own engine, there is also the problem of onboarding new hires. If you use a standard you can go out and hire people already experienced with working on the engine. If you use your own, you have to teach a new hire to use it before they can be any help.
I read that this caused a lot of development woes on Halo Infinite for example.
Great - what am I supposed to do with this? Hope it’s not as shit as the rest of the UE5 games or Cyberpunk? Hope my hardware can run it? Have they learnt nothing from Cyberpunk? Like STFU and maybe show people things when it’s ready?
Nothing. Not every information needs to be actionable by its receivers. Do not get hyped up but know there will be a next installment and wait till they show something.
Yeah - and us consumers don’t need every fucking milestone painted out either. We didn’t back this. Show it to us when it’s time or get the fuck out of my feed. But watch how they’ll go down the cyberpunk route and build hype over 7 years again to deliver a broken piece of shit on launch. Why? Because they made so much money last time doing it.
I do understand the reaction somewhat though… It’s these kinds of news that gets people hyped for a game and leads to the sort of pressure that might make a launch fail as it did with Cyberpunk
Announcing a game is not over-hyping. If you can’t control yourself that a simple announcement that a game is in production makes you have a meltdown, then probably they shouldn’t be browsing the gaming community, where this kind of news is expected
Help me solve my dilemma - I do want to hear about new exciting releases/reviews of upcoming games but I also don’t want news of announced games which are 5+ years away. And especially don’t want to hear about every little morsel of info they throw your way in the 5 year build up only to launch disastrously and then keep us in the news cycle for another 2-3 years where they advertise how they are fixing their game only to turn around and ask for more money to sell you an expansion. How do I just focus on the good ones?
Cyberpunk runs on the RedEngine. This game will be the first for CD Project Red to run Unreal engine.
I agree however that Unreal engine might be a bad choice. We’ll have to see. They change engine because of money as developing an engine is far more expensive than using Unreal Engine.
That makes no sense 🤣 if they had done that then it would mean they would have to develop the game all over again in UE5. UE5 and redENGINE are two different engines and there is no “upgrading” from one engine to the other without making the game all over again in the different engine.
So far, it’s a pretty looking game. The trouble is finding things to do in it.
That was the end of the quest. All setup, no punchline.
There was no one to thank me. All I had was a little more loot. Where’s my impact on the world?
If these quotes ring true in the final game, that’s a hard pass. I want RPGs, action-oriented or not, to allow me to play a role. A million games can make fantasy look pretty, Obsidian needs to make it interesting.
that’s what i’m saying! I hope the quests are more dense with writing in the final release. Well-designed quests with clever writing are the entire appeal of an Obsidian RPG!
After playing part of their game Outer Worlds, I’m not surprised. I thought the writing was alright, but the game felt lacking and empty. I was surprised because I’ve only ever heard good things about New Vegas. I haven’t played New Vegas yet but I’m assuming it’s a much better time
You’d be right in my opinion. New Vegas is incredible. But something felt missing from the outer worlds, and I was hoping they would find it in avowed.
Digital Foundry did an analysis. It’s a mixed bag, some games may look better, some worse. The core problem seems to be the new upscaling technology PSSR from Sony (for haters its pronounced like “pisser”, oh I see in your other comment you are already aware of this lol).
Imagine paying a premium price of 800 Euros and then getting this. Fanboys will defend it no matter what, just like Apple fans defend if they purchase crap.
Every acronym should be run past a bunch of ten year olds. No idea how they thought this was a good idea, but then again, they greenlit Concord at about the same time.
There are quite a lot of ways of making an open world game with infinite replayability without requiring massive maps, but they’re not in the style AAA gaming has been going for in the past decade, they’re more things like Oxygen Not Included, Factorio, Minecraft or Battle Brothers were the game space is procedurally generated, the fun is in conquering the challenges of a map, and once you exhaust it you stop yet end up coming back months later and try a new game with a new map, from scratch, because it’s again fun and there’s no “I know this map” to spoil it.
The handmade game spaces with custom made “adventures” do manage to have better experiences than those games that rely on procedural generation and naturally emerging situations for providing gamers with experiences, but they’re mainly once of and rely on sheer size to remain entertaining for long.
I would absolutely love it if games started going back to the original Borderlands 1 style maps/areas. The type of maps that were more small-medium sized area that were completely self-contained sections of a larger world.
It’s bizarre, there are a ton of mini-games, combat is sometimes fun, storyline is yakuza melo-drama, dripping in themes around loyalty, honor and sacrifice.
Yakuza maps have never been particularly huge. Even in the most recent game, the new map is maybe on the scale of GTA III or Vice City. Still, they manage to pack 15-20 minigames into each game’s word map, some of which involve driving or riding around the map, plus the inevitable scavenger hunts and hidden collectibles.
The key is the “density”, activities and (player) engagements. I find it funny RGG is probably one of developers that can get away reusing assets so much that even can be traced back to ps2 assets on their newer games.
Too big of a map ultimately becomes a deal breaker for me because it will inevitably have too much empty space and get too boring and time consuming to play through.
Smaller more refined maps are better than larger maps where the team can’t sufficiently justify every single corner and make sure every inch truly is fully designed and makes sense.
I realized this idea long, long ago, when Rare made Banjo-Tooie.
Banjo-Kazooie was a fun game. You unlock worlds, go to the world, collect 100% of all there is to collect, then continue.
Banjo-Tooie, its sequel, wanted to be bigger and better in every way. Sprawling open world hub, much larger worlds with more sub-zones, interconnectivity between worlds, more things to unlock, more things to do, etc. etc.
And I think, despite having so much more, it was a worse game for it. You go to a new world but find there’s a lot you can’t do yet because you didn’t unlock an ability that comes later on. You push a button in one world and then something happens in another, but now you have to backtrack through the sprawling overworld and large world maps to get there.
And this was just a pair of games made for the Nintendo 64, before the concept of “open world” had really even taken off.
But it demonstrated to me that bigger was not always better, and having more to do did not make it a better game if it wasn’t as enjoyable.
Early open world games were fairly small, and the natural desire for people who have seen everything becomes “I wish there was more,” but in practice it ends up typically being that they take the same amount of stuff and divide it up over a larger area, or they fill the world with tedium just for the sake of having something to do.
When looking at the collectibles and activities on a world map like Genshin Impact, it’s basically sensory overload with how much there is to do.
But almost all of that is garbage. And this is just a fraction of one region among several. Go here, do this time trial, shoot these balloons, follow this spirit, solve this logic puzzle, and then loot your pittance of gatcha currency so you can try to win your next waifu or husbando before time runs out.
And don’t forget to do your dailies!
If a game has a large world, it needs to act in service to its design. It needs to be fun to exist in and travel through, not tedious. It needs to have enough stuff to do that keep it from feeling empty, but not so much stuff that it makes it hard to find anything worthwhile. And it needs to give enough ability for the player to make their own fun, to act as the balance on that tightrope walk between not-enough and too-much.
Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom are the most recent games that seemed to properly scratch an open world itch for me. While they weren’t perfect, the way they managed to really incorporate the open world as its own sort of puzzle to solve, in ways that Genshin Impact failed to properly emulate, made them more enjoyable as an open world than most other games in that genre I’ve played in recent memory.
I’m burnt out on open world games. Some are good with dense rich areas that are interesting and make you want to explore but most these days are just bland, overly large and filled with generic quests.
Games need to stop being open world for the stake of being open world. I think for a lot of games, having multiple open-ended areas can work much better.
Definitely one of the reasons I absolutely love the original Borderlands. Large world, but broken into a lot smaller chunks/maps. More games doing stuff like that would be absolutely perfect.
I’ve been mulling over this the past few years, having finally kicked the WoW habit in the second year of Shadowlands (approaching ~3 years now)…
…but how often are quests/missions/objectives etc. just a combination of go to x, collect x of y, kill x of y? At a certain point, all of these become generic - right?
Yep pretty much. All games boil down to what you mentioned above but the execution can vastly differ. I guess the low end is the Ubisoft approach where everything is just a generic world and its go climb this tower/ capture this outpost etc and the high end is the Rockstar approach where it might be drive there, do this but things could be different in between that keeps it engaging. I guess it feels more like a living world.
Yeah I guess so. Less like a look here’s a world that I designed, how do we fill it approach and more like a what story do we want to tell and what does the world look like kind of approach if that makes sense.
There’s a whole different angle to game fun which is exploring game mechanics and the complexity that emerges from their combinations and interaction with the game space and the behaviour of independent game entities.
For example (and highly simplified), in Terraria the player has to balance the location of resources, their search and extraction of them, the actual movement, location and needs of the game monsters and NPCs, and their own progression up the “research ladder” (only in Terraria the “research ladder” is implicit and based on which resources have you managed to get your hands on and what have you built with them).
Whilst some of the fun in that game is in exploring a procedurally generated world, the drive to do so and the main fun in the game is to solve the complex problems that emerge from the interaction of those things: you explore to find resources that let you make equipment that allows you to explore more dangerous or harder to reach places to find more complex resources to make more complex equipment and so on and meanwhile the more advanced equipment also lets you do no stuff (IMHO, just merelly “shovel +1 level” equipment improvements are nowhere as satisfying as getting access to new kinds of stuff that let you do new stuff).
Examine games like for example Factorio, Minecraft or Rimworld and you find the same kind of global game loop: do stuff to get stuff to be able do more difficult stuff to get more advanced stuff and so on and all the while the complexity of your choices increases because the combination of options you have goes up as, often, also does the complexity of the World you now have de facto access to.
The AAA world however went down the path of story-like games which have one core linear story (the main quest) and then a bunch of mini-stories (side quests) and were game progression comes from advancing the core story and gaining levels (which themselves are generally just the mathematical result of doing stuff and advancing the core store and doing side stories) that let you do the same things only better and maybe a few news things, ultimatelly to help story progression. Stories “officially” drive the player’s exploration (though some players also self driven to just explore just because of liking to explore) and it seems to be impossible to get good stories working well in procedurally generated worlds (as No Man’s Sky has proven, IMHO). There is often some amount of the same mechanics as I describe above for open world indie games, but they’re not the core of the game and what drives the player.
And yeah, if your game is story driven and you can’t procedurally generate the game space with good stories, you’re going to hit limits in the size of the thing, either on the size of the game space that has to be handcrafted to work well with the stories or in the amount of stories being insufficient for the game space leading to lots of boring game space that feels empty like it’s just filler.
It’d be nice if JRPGs would go back to the old school overworld design like in Star Ocean 2. It’s a good compromise between sense of scale and interactivity with the world.
I’d rejoice, but I’ll believe it when I see it happening consistently. I want smaller, denser, and richer worlds. Not giant, sprawling, and barren. It doesn’t add anything to a game for me if I have to walk or drive 10 minutes to get to my next location and it’s just empty in between.
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