TecRah

Wen Xue Dexing

Editor Liu Shiwu

Looking at recent years, working with commercial third-party engines seems to be an important option for 3A game development.

At the TGA 2024 Game of the Year Awards, 2K Games and its developer Hangar 13 announced that they were abandoning their in-house Fusion engine and adopting Unreal Engine 5 for the development of the newest installment in the Quadripod series, Quadripod Hometown.

Similarly, CD Projekt RED has also ditched its REDengine for Unreal Engine 5 for the next generation of The Witcher games, with game director Sebastian Kalemba revealing that the trailer was also pre-rendered using a customized Unreal Engine 5 based on an undisclosed NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics card.

Looking back at the past two years, games such as Black Myth, Goku, and Atomic Heart, which have had outstanding performance, have also been powered by the Unreal Engine, with Black Myth switching from Unreal 4 to Unreal 5 halfway through development. Even big games that have long invested resources in their own engines and have had a certain foundation, such as the Silent Hill 2RE and Halo series, have also switched over to the Unreal Engine 5.

It’s quite common for small and medium-sized studios that lack engine development capabilities to adopt mainstream commercial engines, but does the fact that many studios that develop 3A and big games are abandoning their own engines and switching to commercial engines reflect a trend in the game industry that has changed in recent years?

Why are the flowers of the family not as fragrant as the wildflowers?

To put it simply, a game engine is a set of standardized, modularized, and generalized development tools. For today’s large-scale game development, which often requires hundreds of people, a development platform that provides a collaborative environment and a large number of ready-to-use features is undoubtedly a necessity.

For a long time, self-developed engines have been seen as a symbol of a game company’s strength, as only large companies can afford the technology and labor costs required to develop an engine. To be able to produce a set of suitable development tools, either applying them to their own games to ensure their competitiveness in the industry or promoting them commercially to the industry to collect a toll fee, no matter what, it seems to be a profitable and rewarding business.

Many famous game companies have a set of self-developed and continuously improved game engines based on their technology accumulation, which in turn help the production of many games. For example, V’s Origins engine is involved in the production of famous FPS games such as Half-Life 2 Counter-Strike series, and its later magically modified version even develops battle royale competitive games such as Apex. The characteristics of the games developed by various game makers based on their own engines have also been enjoyed by gamers.

Apex has inherited the classic “easy to hide” phenomenon of the Origin engine.

Recently, the frequent emergence of game manufacturers outsourcing commercial engine phenomenon, have to make people lament the times have changed.

Looking back at the studios’ statements of reason, one of the most obvious clues is that developing or even modifying their own engines has become laborious in various ways.

Former employee Bart Wronski tweeted about how CDPR actually uses its own engine They’ll abandon the entire engine and rewrite it from scratch every time, hoping it’ll be better and more efficient this time, but then make a mess of it due to the rush to get it to work, resulting in an engine that’s impossible to maintain or use at all.

The same can be said for the developers of the Halo series, as art director Chris Matthews said in an interview with Xbox Wire that some parts of Slipspace are nearly 25 years old. While Studio 343 has continued to develop it, there are aspects of the Unreal Engine that we can’t use in Slipspace and it would take a lot of time and resources to try and replicate.

At the end of the day, a game engine always serves the desired gameplay effect and the efficiency of development. Considerations about game engines are more of a cost and benefit game.

Many long-established engines have accumulated a lot of technical debt, i.e., certain errors in the engine have been solidified in various ways. Due to the turnover of developers, the cost of modifying and resolving these bugs is extremely high, and modifications to the underlying code can trigger a chain reaction if not careful.

In this regard, it is clear that today’s commercial engines, which have evolved and iterated over several generations, are on a much stronger footing. As I mentioned earlier, CDPR’s game director Jason Slamajuic himself said in a live broadcast that Epic’s Unreal 5 engine is much more stable, and that at least one change to the code won’t affect 1,600 other places.

Therefore, the replacement of the engine, on the one hand, is the consideration of development efficiency, on the other hand, also means that the commercial engine in the development and iteration of the formation of a more mature technical system and standardized operating procedures, and in the rendering of physical collisions, visual effects, cross-platform compatibility, and other dimensions to meet or even meet the needs of large-scale games, we can fully from the history of the iteration of the unreal engine to see this point.

Unreal Iteration History 26 Years of Accumulation and Commercial Transformation

The Unreal Engine was first released by Epic Games in 1998, when the game Unreal Tournament was also unveiled. As the first game in the Unreal series, Unreal Tournament’s complex maps, varied weaponry, and unique gameplay modes attracted many gamers and laid the groundwork for the Unreal Engine’s subsequent development.

On the basis of the first generation, Epic continued to improve and develop the next generation of the engine, in terms of picture quality, rendering, operation level, cross-platform and other aspects of the enhancement, to the release of the Unreal Engine 3, its powerful features in the character modeling, scene construction, lighting and shadow effects, and other aspects of the epoch-making technical vibration to the gaming industry, so much so that many of the domestic online games began to borrow the Unreal Engine to create a technological innovation of the line to publicize the quality of their own games. quality of the game.

In the Unreal 4 era, the engine has gone up a level in large scene construction and game details, and more familiar large-scale games have been developed, such as PUBG, Fortnite, and Final Fantasy VII Remake, which have been recognized by a wider range of groups for the Unreal Engine’s production capabilities and image quality.

Tifa’s character model and facial details in Final Fantasy VII Remake have been described as great by players.

But looking back at the TGA award-winning games from 2014 to 2020, we can actually see that the Unreal series, while the engine has sparked a technological revolution and has become popular in the eyes of the public, lacks in a certain masculine artistic component.

Calculating from the release of the Unreal 4 engine in 2014 to 2020, the relevant game works that won the TGA awards are really not many, especially in the best game of the year, The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt Watchman Pioneer Zelda Breath of the Kure God of War 4 Only Wolf Shadow of the Dead II These have a count of one, all from the big manufacturers of the self-developed engine.

Until 2022, this uninspired scene is finally replaced by a blowout of games based on the Unreal Engine, and at this year’s TGA ceremony alone, there were more than a dozen major games based on the Unreal Engine, or soon to be based on the Unreal Engine.

What’s even more remarkable is that the newly released Unreal Engine 5 is now on the radar of well-known game studios as a guest of honor. As mentioned above, CDPR, the developer of The Witcher 3, and 343 Industries, the developer of the Halo series, are both putting their major releases into Unreal 5-based development, with the former hoping to increase the efficiency of multi-project co-development and the latter looking forward to the visual and technological possibilities that Unreal 5 will bring to the reimagined world of Halo.

Halo Studios’ experimental projects built on Unreal 5

The technological breakthroughs of Unreal 5 are obvious to everyone, from Lumen’s dynamic global lighting solution, to Nanite’s virtual geometry technology that supports direct import of hundreds of millions of polygons with high precision, to Niagara’s particle system that introduces GPU particle simulation, we can imagine the engine’s leading position in rendering, production efficiency, and collaboration systems. Collaboration systems and more.

Regardless of the reasons why these studios abandoned years of technical investment and development, Unreal 5’s technological and consequent commercial advancements are a fact of life.

It can even be said that the commercial progress of Unreal 5 is a qualitative change compared to the other four generations, which means that third-party engines have begun to replace the old proprietary engines in the development of 3A games.

Of course, Unreal 5 isn’t quite that versatile. At the end of the day, an engine will still have its own set of characteristics, and no commercial engine will be able to fully satisfy a manufacturer’s unique vision of game development. A few days ago, Ubisoft’s technical director Pierre Fulton said in an interview that Assassin’s Creed Shadow’s development is still using its own AnvilNext engine, rather than Epic Games’ Unreal 5, because they have different views on optimizing gameplay.

So instead of saying that Unreal 5 can replace a homegrown engine to produce unique 3A masterpieces, it’s more likely that some manufacturers are losing out to homegrown engines due to the cost and effectiveness of development. When the cost and effectiveness of the commercial engine side develops to a sufficiently attractive point, then it is not surprising that some of the old-school self-developed engines fall out of favor, because the young game industry is slowly shifting from the workshop-style creative technology development to the factory-like clustering and standardized production.

The Future of Game Engines

At present, the mainstream third-party engines, led by Unity Unreal Cocos Godot, have actually covered most of the game production from mobile applets to PC, from large-scale 3D open world to 2D pixel style.

In a way, with the advent of Unreal 5, third-party engines have become a rather attractive option even for large studios that want to make iconic games with gameplay, plot, and graphics.

If we look at game production as mining, standard, convenient, and complete mechanized equipment is undoubtedly the way to go for the kind of clustered cooperation that large-scale 3A games require. With the development of mainstream commercial engines and the spread of the market, it seems that it is becoming less and less lucrative for game companies to build their own shovels and equipment.

According to this trend, the first prediction is that, with the continuous expansion of the third-party engine territory, the competition between commercial engine companies will become more and more intense, and depending on the fee situation, the game developers will also become the object of fierce struggle for the open providers, and I am afraid that the events similar to the controversy over Unity’s fee will be repeated in the future.

And it’s not just the engine developers that will be fighting it out. Will the game content companies that don’t want to be left out of the development conversation be left out as well? Will even the new tech companies want a piece of the action?

Later this year, a Google team developed a new game engine technology called GameGen, which can generate high-quality game images in real time and respond to player input. A few days ago at the annual meeting of China’s game industry, giant network also released a thousand shadows QianYing audible game generation model, to show their own AI game engine layout in advance, which may have shown the answer.

Finally, as an ordinary gamer, I may marvel at the picture and performance improvement brought by the Unreal engine, but I don’t want to see a scene where Unreal 5 covers all the big games. After all, not only does this represent some sort of monopoly threat to the gaming industry, but it also means a homogenization of game styles and features.

The Unreal engine seeks to achieve an extreme level of real-world graphics overlap, but such a style is only one of many possible styles, and when such styles are mass-produced and recognizable, the corresponding burnout often follows.

So after being visually bombarded by a number of industrial-grade luxury masterpieces, we’ll be looking forward to an idyllic workshop game instead, and that’s probably one of the reasons why this year’s Cosmic Robo won TGA of the Year.

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