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There is a secondary argument in favor of home-grown engines too. It's been very disappointing to see so many game companies abandon their own rendering technol
by _hypx 3y ago
There is a secondary argument in favor of home-grown engines too. It's been very disappointing to see so many game companies abandon their own rendering technology in favor of Unreal. Terrible licensing rules might drive companies to go back to having their own engines.
- dvngnt_ 3y agoI feel like each year makes it harder as demands increase
- _hypx 3y agoNever every game needs to have insane graphics. For a lot of games, “good enough” graphics is fine.
- gochi 3y agoIt's not just graphics, it's everything. Look at Frostbite for example from EA. While a good shooter engine, they had to make significant changes over the years to adapt the engine to other genres of games, and that significantly bloated timelines. Jason Schreier has reporting on this if you're interested. We kind of forget that a lot of custom engines aren't universal ones like Unity or Unreal that can adapt to anything you throw at it. Custom engines are largely hyper specific to the type of game they were making with it, everything else is experimental, untested, undocumented, or non-existent!
- _hypx 3y agoFrostbite is a weird example because they focused heavily on graphics over gameplay. It is also an FPS engine that was forced into powering an RPG, and without any real input from the developers in question. I'm sure most larger gamedev companies can make a decent game engine on their own if extreme performance is not needed. The recent Baldur's Gate is a good example.
- autoexec 3y agoHonestly I prefer games with a strong sense of style over those with high quality graphics but a bland/generic look.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoyou're asking for consumers to temper their expectations. Just look at how much crap they threw at Redfall, and that was likely a game many people played on Gamepass for "free". It sucks but part of that "need" for insane graphics is consumer driven. Even though Nintendo games get a lot of flack for how "weak" the Switch is, but their big IPs do cirlcles around the industry, all on one platform without even relying on MTX. But I guess Nintendo appealing to more than just the core gamers helps a lot. Come to think of it, it's surprising how few "family" AAA games there are these days.
- _hypx 3y agoRedfall was an incomplete game. Graphics was the least of its problems.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoGamers are calling a lot of games lately incomplete. It doesn't stop sales if it looks good enough.
- _hypx 3y agoRedfall sold disastrously. The days of releasing an incomplete game are apparently over.
- johnnyanmac 3y agookay, and I can point to a dozen games called unfinished that sold fine. We are far from over those days. We're nitpicking at this point. Can we at least go back to the core topic and agree that critics and consumers are generally more sympathetic to games with good graphics?
- _hypx 3y agoWe are moving past that phase. All of the broken games got terrible reviews and many were immediately abandoned after launch.
- johnnyanmac 3y agogamers are weird like that. I think you can still be successul without crazy graphics, but the PR you will get around the net will be dreadful because people want to justify their high end rigs or their next gen consoles. And those people are disproportionately more likely to comment. But you also can't listen too much to the core gaming audience because they also don't think more subtly about what makes a game fun. And despite that PR good looking games can still sell. No wonder the market is so unstable, it's audience is fickle.