Smiled at the sight of Mig. (Gaming)

by EffortlessFury , Friday, October 28, 2022, 14:37 (760 days ago) @ Cody Miller

He brought up how game development costs have dramatically risen over the years. I suggested that a possible solution to that problem could be to invest into the tools used to create the games. The goal being to streamline workflows so that devs have an easier time quickly creating. For example, I always think of this awesome demo Kojima did showing off features of the Fox Engine used to build Metal Gear Solid 5. In just minutes, he's able to build a convincing scene. Cool stuff.

Fascinatingly enough, Chris Butcher remarked at GDC several years ago that it was, quite frankly, going to become infeasible for the vast majority of the industry to create their own engines in the future. That's why Destiny is technically still running on a modified BLAM engine. You simply can't start from scratch anymore. You're right that investing in tooling is important, it's just becoming difficult to do that properly in and of itself.

Which is why engines like Unreal Engine 5 are making it way easier to do stuff like that MGS5 demo showed. I'm not a developer, but all the features and things they are highlighting are about making creation far easier and more streamlined. CD Projekt RED has decided to switch to Unreal 5 for their next Witcher game instead of their engine they've been using for everything. It just makes more sense to me that a big company does nothing but maintain and create an engine, then game devs take that engine, which is itself flexible and customizable, and create their games from that.

There's so many cool games that just would not exist without Unity. Seems to me like game engine creation WILL be something game developers just don't do in the future, and they'll be all the better for it since they can spend resources on actually making the game and not just getting the tech working.

The benefits of using engines like UE and Unity are vast (though Unity is becoming more of a questionable choice as of late), but there's also that ever present specter of consolidation on the horizon. You don't necessarily want more than half of the industry dependent on one or even two engines...that could have devastating consequences.

It's no question, though, that UE5 enables some mindblowing possibilities right out of the box.