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Forums - Gaming - Digital Foundry: Yooka Laylee looks and runs great

It's sad that reviewers destroyed this game the way they did, since the fraseare and camera issues were the main problem.... they should re review the game tbh



 

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curl-6 said:
Nuvendil said:

But it's not free is what baffles me.  There's a free version but to get seroius - as they wanted to - you need to at least pay $75 a month iirc.  UE4 was I think $25 a month at the time?  So yeah, no idea.

And yeah, it's impressive for Unity but that's the issue, this is the top of what Unity can do and it struggles with it at that.  Hopefully Playtonic can step in and help improve things some but I highly doubt it since it would require a lot of work to get appreciable improvements done. 

Beats me then. Isn't Unity supposed to be quite flexible and easy to work with, isn't that how it got so popular?

Unity is quite easy to work with and excellent for your more modest efforts in terms technical goals.  The issue is when you start going for UE4/CryEngine/etc type results, as there's sort of a soft-cap for what the engine is capable of.  This and Gloria Victis are the most impressive games I've seen from the engine as far as technical achievement.  And it's been problematic for console development too.  Which is why teams like the one behind Ori and the Blind Forest often rewrite massive portions of the engine.  Now the coding language is apparently easier to work with for beginners than what you'll find in UE4, making such overhauls easier, but the need for them still remains.  

My guess is they simply overreached with Unity.  They had experience with it probably and figured why not?  There have been multiple indies that have picked an engine only to realize it was not wise.  I have seen some indies jump from CryEngine to Unreal 4 for example.  But sometimes the project is so far along that devs figure they have better odds of pushing forward and making the selected engine work.  I think that's what happened here.  I mean, look at the early screenshots of the levels and compare them to what is seen here, the downgrade is very noteworthy in many areas.

Not that I was necessarily convinced they could achieve that level of polygonal density and resolution on textures but still, you can see they clearly had a very different perception of what was possible than what turned out to actually be possible.  


And now that I look at that screen and some other ones...did no one see this art style change? Cause I personally prefer the look in that screen to the current look.



Nuvendil said:
curl-6 said:

Beats me then. Isn't Unity supposed to be quite flexible and easy to work with, isn't that how it got so popular?

Unity is quite easy to work with and excellent for your more modest efforts in terms technical goals.  The issue is when you start going for UE4/CryEngine/etc type results, as there's sort of a soft-cap for what the engine is capable of.  This and Gloria Victis are the most impressive games I've seen from the engine as far as technical achievement.  And it's been problematic for console development too.  Which is why teams like the one behind Ori and the Blind Forest often rewrite massive portions of the engine.  Now the coding language is apparently easier to work with for beginners than what you'll find in UE4, making such overhauls easier, but the need for them still remains.  

My guess is they simply overreached with Unity.  They had experience with it probably and figured why not?  There have been multiple indies that have picked an engine only to realize it was not wise.  I have seen some indies jump from CryEngine to Unreal 4 for example.  But sometimes the project is so far along that devs figure they have better odds of pushing forward and making the selected engine work.  I think that's what happened here. 

Any word on how Unity performs on Switch btw? Hopefully that version runs as well as those released so far, or close to it at least. Slash the resolution to 720p docked and sub-HD portable if need be. 



curl-6 said:
Nuvendil said:

Unity is quite easy to work with and excellent for your more modest efforts in terms technical goals.  The issue is when you start going for UE4/CryEngine/etc type results, as there's sort of a soft-cap for what the engine is capable of.  This and Gloria Victis are the most impressive games I've seen from the engine as far as technical achievement.  And it's been problematic for console development too.  Which is why teams like the one behind Ori and the Blind Forest often rewrite massive portions of the engine.  Now the coding language is apparently easier to work with for beginners than what you'll find in UE4, making such overhauls easier, but the need for them still remains.  

My guess is they simply overreached with Unity.  They had experience with it probably and figured why not?  There have been multiple indies that have picked an engine only to realize it was not wise.  I have seen some indies jump from CryEngine to Unreal 4 for example.  But sometimes the project is so far along that devs figure they have better odds of pushing forward and making the selected engine work.  I think that's what happened here. 

Any word on how Unity performs on Switch btw? Hopefully that version runs as well as those released so far, or close to it at least. Slash the resolution to 720p docked and sub-HD portable if need be. 

Not much word on Unity on Switch I don't think, not as much as UE4.  Mainly because 1) UE4 features more advanced features thus it running on Switch is more impressive and therefore better headline and 2) the only noteworthy games using Unity on the Switch are Bomberman and I Am Setsuna which are poor benchmarks while Unreal Engine 4 has Snake Pass which isn't a gigantic game but has a lot going on for what it is.  So We'll just have to wait and see.  



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Nuvendil said:
curl-6 said:

Any word on how Unity performs on Switch btw? Hopefully that version runs as well as those released so far, or close to it at least. Slash the resolution to 720p docked and sub-HD portable if need be. 

Not much word on Unity on Switch I don't think, not as much as UE4.  Mainly because 1) UE4 features more advanced features thus it running on Switch is more impressive and therefore better headline and 2) the only noteworthy games using Unity on the Switch are Bomberman and I Am Setsuna which are poor benchmarks while Unreal Engine 4 has Snake Pass which isn't a gigantic game but has a lot going on for what it is.  So We'll just have to wait and see.  

Yeah Snake Pass is a nice UE4 showcase for Switch. The resolution may be low, but it shows that you can get surprisingly close to the PS4/Xbone experience with just a few simple cutbacks. The fact they got it up and running on Switch in just a week also bodes well.



curl-6 said:
Nuvendil said:

Not much word on Unity on Switch I don't think, not as much as UE4.  Mainly because 1) UE4 features more advanced features thus it running on Switch is more impressive and therefore better headline and 2) the only noteworthy games using Unity on the Switch are Bomberman and I Am Setsuna which are poor benchmarks while Unreal Engine 4 has Snake Pass which isn't a gigantic game but has a lot going on for what it is.  So We'll just have to wait and see.  

Yeah Snake Pass is a nice UE4 showcase for Switch. The resolution may be low, but it shows that you can get surprisingly close to the PS4/Xbone experience with just a few simple cutbacks. The fact they got it up and running on Switch in just a week also bodes well.

Yeah, Snake Pass's performance for a last minute port done in a month is exceptional.  With more time and fiddling they could have gotten it better, probably a full 720p in docked and looking extremely similar.  And of course that's with them wanting high quality AA and if I recall correctly good texture filtering which if you aren't controlling a character that's like five inches tall can be scaled back on a bit without much noticeable lost quality.