By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
shikamaru317 on 04 May 2023
Edit Thread
Ryuu96 said:
shikamaru317 said:

Honestly I think blaming Redfall's issues on Unreal 4 is a bit of a copout. Redfall's open world isn't particularly large, we have seen Unreal 4 used on larger open worlds than Redfall with much better results. I don't think the engine itself is to blame, Arkane clearly just weren't familiar with it, most of their dev team previously worked on games like Dishonored Death of the Outsider (Void Engine) and Prey (Cry Engine), they just didn't have experience with Unreal Engine heading in and clearly never asked Zenimax or Xbox for help until it was too late.

Plenty of devs have made Unreal 4 work for open world games (Sea of Thieves, Hogwarts Legacy, Ghostwire Tokyo, Days Gone, Conan Exiles, Biomutant, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, etc.) or games with multiple fairly large maps (Kingdom Hearts 3, Code Vein, Blue Protocol, Borderlands 3, FF7 Remake, The Outer Worlds, PUBG, etc.), and many of them did so while pulling off better graphics and/or performance than Arkane Austin managed on Redfall. Many more devs are using Unreal 5 on their upcoming games with a single open world map (the next Witcher game or Ark 2 for instance) or with multiple fairly large maps (Mass Effect 4 and Black Myth: Wukong for instance). I don't think we can truly say that Unreal is bad for games with larger map sizes, it seems to be at least above average for larger map sizes or else so many devs wouldn't be using it for games with larger maps.

No, Redfall's issues are clearly 95% on Arkane. What I mean is that they probably couldn't get help from ID Software because it's a different engine than they're used to. However, I am a bit concerned for Avowed if it is fully open-world because a few issues are due to Unreal Engine 4.

I feel like or thought it was common knowledge that Unreal Engine isn't the best for Open-Worlds? Stuff like Pop-In, etc. Additionally it's a lot behind even Creation Engine, it's only now with Unreal Engine 5 that they're adding World Partitioning, something which Creation Engine has used in their Open-Worlds for years.

There's some good examples listed there which work but IIRC Ghostwire Tokyo, Days Gone, Conan Exiles, Biomutant all had technical issues, as does Jedi Survivor, I often hear people blame Unreal Engine for these issues. Borderlands 3 also had performance issues and The Outer Worlds is Hub Based, not Open-World and the Hubs aren't that large.

Dead Island 2 went Hub-Based instead of Open-World and is one of the best performing titles this year, Lol. Ark 2 will run like shit too.

A lot of developers are moving to Unreal Engine 5 so hopefully they've fixed the issues it has with large Open-Worlds but it remains to be seen, that may not mean anything for Avowed though if it's running Unreal Engine 4. I'd also wonder if it also contributed to Playground choosing Forzatech over Unreal Engine for Fable.

Sawyer's comments on Creation.

That's one of the things Bethesda's toolset makes very easy. It's super easy to make areas, super easy to modify, super easy to track assets, and it's pretty darn powerful. Look at this way: there's no way in hell that our team could have made Fallout New Vegas without that tool. It was just impossible. And if you look at the mods, it's astounding what people can do with it. I personally think that is very cool. I hope we get to the point where we can actually develop tools like that. I wouldn't say it's a personally driving ambition, it's something that I hope we do.

I do really appreciate how easy it was in New Vegas to make stuff and modify stuff... The scripting system in the Bethesda engine is also very powerful and you can also do crazy stuff as well. But I do appreciate the ease-of-use stuff they had in Bethesda's editors.

Only now is Unreal Engine catching up to Creation in some Open-World aspects.

I hope Unreal Engine improves on these issues but the question is more if Avowed is UE4 or UE5.

I edited in my thoughts on Avowed after you quoted so I will post them again here:

I can't say I'm particularly worried about Avowed, for starters Jez saw the initial build before the partial reboot in 2021 and said it already looked great on Unreal 4, when the reboot happened they switched to Unreal 5 which is an even more capable engine based on what we have seen from it. Secondly, Obsidian has Unreal engine experience already from developing The Outer Worlds and Grounded on Unreal 4, unlike Arkane Austin who seemed to have alot less devs at the studio who were familiar with Unreal engine development, and they are under Booty's 1st party division which means they can more easily ask for help from the Unreal master developers at The Coalition and Ninja Theory if they start to struggle. Thirdly, we don't know if the current build of Avowed after the 2021 reboot is fully open world or has multiple smaller but still large maps and fast travel for getting between them, they may be going for multiple maps to better portray the large world where Pillars of Eternity and Avowed are set and it's multiple unique regions with different climates, flora, and fauna. I think Avowed will end up looking pretty darn good, especially if they make use of some of Unreal 5's features such as Lumen lightning and Unreal 5's large free library of high res Nanite textures.