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.
I found Cal Kestis to be the most generic sounding and looking Star wars character. The games are fun but I found myself uninterested in him as a character
I agree with you, he’s kind of a blank slate.
I think that works for a video game though.
It’s also refreshingly NOT the chosen one or blood line thing that’s a bit overdone in Star Wars.
(Crossing my fingers he’s not secretly a long lost Skywalker, Palpatine or Kenobi relative)
Many stories introduce the protagonist in their prime, or when they’re at their most interesting, then eventually release an origin story.
The first game felt like an origin story for a dude I didn’t know. (Haven’t played the second game yet)
My guess (hope) is he’ll feel more interesting as he gets more exposure and character development as games come out and we kinda get to see him grow as we play.
Yeah I get what you're saying about him being a blank slate. I guess I'm just tired of generic white dudes as being the definition of blank slate. I hope he does get more interesting, I found the other characters far more fun to follow than Cal
Yea for sure, he could have been a blank slate without being as bland or generic. By that I absolutely don’t mean to imply the actor is any of these things, but that they played it safe in character design.
Expecially in a universe of endless aliens.
It’s not even a choice that has to be limited between our own human heritages.
Hypothetically I don’t see a problem with things like a new entry in Elder Scrolls. The problem (to me) seems more like constantly remaking Skyrim into new editions and for each new console.
That’s pretty much Starfield in a nutshell, Skyrim in space. Don’t get me wrong it’s a fun game but it’s basically reskinned Skyrim with a few new systems bolted on. I’m also noticing some reused assets from Fallout, pretty sure the noise the scanner makes when opening is the same as opening the PipBoy.
“These AAA publishers have, mostly, used this production scale to keep their top franchises in the top selling games each year.”
I never quite understood, why it’s not more popular among big publishers to create smaller games throughout the year. You can have risky AAA titles in development and compete in the AA market at the same time.
It's just easier to advertise a single big game rather than several smaller ones. Even if you are interested in games it's impossible to keep track of everything that's being released. More casual players are aware of even fewer games. That's why AAA games still sell so well because they are the only games a lot of people are even aware of.
If the companies have to split their marketing budget between multiple titles, they would reach a much smaller audience. And even if one of the smaller titles would be a hit, it probably sells fewer copies for a lower price.
Half the cost of the game is marketing. And marketing is an effort that builds upon itself
The more smaller games you have, the more you have to market to niches from scratch. And niches are generally more inclined to be informed users. And it takes a developer with vision to make a satisfying niche hit. Well it always takes vision but…
Meanwhile one big bombastic game will get a bunch of mainstream folks hyped over qualifiers of scope instead of quality. Yes, I am saying hype culture is primarily an idiot’s hobby, but idiots still got cash.
Plus, plus, most studios don’t really see their junior devs as something worth fostering. Better off burning them out and replacing them.
Because the first job of anybody who is responsible for green lighting game development at these huge publishers is to not get fired. Making a game that only just breaks even or even worse makes a loss puts you at risk of getting fired. Even a relatively small game from a large publisher costs a ton to develop and market and has increased risk that nobody will actually buy and play it, at least in the most profitable first few months.
Franchises are so popular with this crowd is because they do not have to worry about name recognition. Hardest thing about getting a brand new title out is just getting people to know it exists and then to be excited about it. Franchises you hardly have to to do any work for that, you know you are going to get press and gamer interest, they sell themselves right up until they release and people get the chance to see if its a house of cards or not.
Its that front loading of sales that they are after, the shops having to buy in stock, idiots who pre order or buy before its clear if the game is broken in someway. Its the most profitable time as the game is at its most expensive, and it enables rapid repayment of the development costs. Games that start slow and have a very long tail of sales do not interest them anywhere near as much as they have already moved onto the next project and already been judged on the initial (under) performance of the game.
Yeah, the first and only time I did a pre-order, the company went bankrupt. I was thinking of pre-ordering something from EA in case there was a curse on me and they would go bankrupt as well.
Everyone will call me naive again but how about we actually hold people to their word?
Why is it not illegal for say politicians to say one thing and do the opposite?
If a game studio says „we‘re gonna make the greatest game ever!“ I would like to make them prove it or refund everyone.
You can’t say „contains no nuts“ and put nuts in it, why is there a caveat for other stuff? Just keep to the truth. Why is it so hard to normalize advertising without tons of hyperbole?
(I‘m autistic and I see telling the truth as a good thing. I don’t understand why someone would like to be lied to. Omit something to not hurt them, ok. But outright lying is wrong on a binary level imo. As in not ok ever.)
You're right, they should be held accountable. Unfortunately, the easiest and most effective way to hold them accountable for the average person is to not blindly trust them. There just isn't good forms of recourse for us to challenge things like this when it happens, so the best bet is to not preorder things so that they have to prove it is what they say it will be.
I agree. But I also believe that we give up to easily because „thats the way it is“. My point is we should push more in the other direction and try to go binary (right/wrong) as much as possible. If something is morally wrong, it needs to be put into law asap nearly no matter the cost.
I agree 100%. In business, you have to prove your innocence when subject to a lawsuit. Same goes for lying imo.
If you ran out of money to keep your promise, you will be able to prove that. Same goes for having to compromise to get some other benefit.
The initial point I was trying to make is that we are so accustomed (imo) to being lied to that we don’t make people prove that they didn’t plan that from the beginning.
For example: where I live, it is common practice to make food pictures for ads or menus that a) dont resemble the final product and b) are made with completely different, often inedible substances to look like a better version of the real deal. Something that an hones picture can never achieve. This needs to be illegal. This is not someone running out of money or compromising but premeditated lying.
They use ai to generate inaccurate pages, cover up text with egregious ads and refuse to remove content written by dissatisfied, migrating users but mostly just make unusable websites in general (I’m sure there’s even more reasons to boycott however)
And before that the majority of their content was scraped from other, well-meaning sources. They just have great SEO, don’t mind copy+pasting, and hope that the network effect makes them to de facto source for [insert topic] while serving you ads.
Their website is also extremely laggy with all the boatloads of ads they keep covering their pages with. The ads really got extremely out of control and made the entire website completely unusable for me - at least it’s possible to bypass that with BreezeWiki for now…
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