| twintail said: I dunno, I think its not quite this cut and dry. I can definitely see why JPN devs are probably avoiding putting effort into their own engines due to fears of sales to recuperate the investment, and so UE4 was a blessing. But I do agree that their own optimised engines would probably be better in the long run. The RE Engine, from Capcom, is pretty damn good I feel. As for Western devs, I think it also depends on the publisher and the respective team. Like, for example, Days Gone: considering their history of games not selling that well, or projects being cancelled etc, taking UE4 an optimizing it for what they needed obviously made financial success. Building an engine for a a failed game would get the studio nowhere, and the only other open world engine they have, Decima, isn't really designed with the Horde system in mind. So I suppose what I am saying is that yes, publisher specific engines are definitely more ideal but I don't think every situation calls for it. Engines like UE should always be a possibility depending on the scope or demands of the game, otherwise dev time is just going to go into making another engine first, or visions need to be compromised because the current publisher engines don't do what the dev requires. |
For many of the smaller Japanese developers/publishers or projects, it does make sense to use generic engines like UE4 but even building a custom engine in their case can pay off tremendously like we see with the RE Engine from Capcom as you mentioned since it could be potentially used for many titles they work on but there's absolutely no excuse why much bigger publishers such as Square Enix or Bandai Namco can't do the same for their own in-house and affiliated developer teams since they undertake many projects ...
Technical limitations may rear it's head far earlier when using a generic engine and that especially applies to UE4 since consoles aren't a priority anymore to Epic Games since the advent of UE3 but I don't blame them for it when they don't have stake anymore in consoles. Ever since Tencent acquired a 40% stake in Epic Games and Microsoft secured full rights to the Gears of War franchise they very clearly went astray from their own roots ... (even their original franchise Unreal Tournament took a massive backseat)
UE3 was a good enough solution because Epic Games back then was far more motivated in delivering the cutting edge high performance graphics technology for console games instead mobile platforms such as Android, iOS, and even the Switch becoming the spotlight but UE4 on the other hand succeeded for totally different reasons ...
Unlike UE3, it's successor UE4 stopped building upon it's solid technical foundation or fundamentals and management started heavily focusing on Japanese documentation along with mobile devices which is why we see a massive shift in the user's of these engines today. UE went from being a Western centric to a Japanese centric game engine. It's pretty clear Epic Games stopped answering calls from EA/Ubisoft and started taking calls from Bandai Namco/Square Enix ...
Hopefully, Sony Bend will use Decima for their next project instead because I don't think it was a technical limitation that stopped them from using it but rather it wasn't ready in time for mass production when they were developing Days Gone and I hope Capcom for their own sake they keep expanding on their new RE Engine which looks extremely promising since they had painstaking start for the first half of this generation by using interim solutions and we badly need to see a new Monster Hunter game built on it. As for Microsoft and their game studios, I don't know what they'll do next and I'm somewhat disappointed that Square Enix Japan has exited the race for developing a high end engine technology ...
Not arguing the UE shouldn't be an option but for big high end graphics projects, it should be the absolute last resort since it'll very hard to get optimization issues under wraps ...
