3 ms·
Those may be "common" features across a number of games, but no one is sharing code in games. The hobby experience is shifting with respect to how broad the Uni
by WorldMaker 5y ago
Those may be "common" features across a number of games, but no one is sharing code in games. The hobby experience is shifting with respect to how broad the Unity marketplace is starting to be in pluggable modules, but AAA games is still mostly the land of massive NIH and almost every game is still much more a bespoke artisanal thing with very little reused under the hood from game to game than any game player imagines.
This seems especially so in CDPR's case: they aren't using Unreal or any other off-the-shelf engine, they developed their own engine bespoke for The Witcher. Cyberpunk 2077 was the first game to use that engine for something that wasn't The Witcher series. A lot of their technical hurdles seem almost entirely related: it doesn't seem like it should be a huge surprise that a game engine originally built for a setting where the fastest traveling vehicle is a horse starts to fall down with performance problems when you introduce cars and sky cars and planes.
(Some small credit where credit is due: Rockstar at least started with GTA and then moved to RDR. Cars to horses seems to make more sense as a transition for a game engine than the other way around.)
Absolutely there are probably technical things CDPR could have done to avoid some of the problems they've had, but it was way more of a "programming challenge" than "why didn't they just copy and paste the hacking component from Fallout [Bethesda/Microsoft] and scanning from Arkham Asylum [Rocksteady/Warner Brothers] and call it a day?" (They couldn't, there's no way to access those components from other companies. There's no "Unity store" for that sort of stuff. There's not even a "Unity" here: all three of those franchises have extremely different bespoke game engines that never leave the doors of their development companies or publishers.)