A company rolling its own engine implies three things that can contribute to good visuals. One, they have the technical skill to actually pull that rabbit out of the hat, and having deep subject matter experts on your rendering team is rarely a bad thing. Two, they likely have a strong personal investment in the quality of what they're making, it's a huge commitment and probably not financially optimal for most studios. Three, the engine is likely specifically catered to the kind of art its intended to render.
I guess a MiddleWare to handle graphics, storage, input, audio, networking, ... would have much more value for the game industry and I think this is how RenderWare worked.
@@vitordelima That is what the Ogre engine was made for and is now unfortunately dying, it is only a render engine and some game companies have used it and even made comercial engines on top of it. One famous team that used Ogre for some cool games was the hill fated Runic Games.
I've seen metaphors that compared engines like DICE's Frostbite to a Formula 1 car while Unreal was compared to an SUV. Neither of them are bad, one is just far more specialized and tailor built to a specific purpose while the other was made to be a "do it all" workhorse.
@@Velly2gok. That doesn't apply to what Jaman said 😂. It's refreshing to see proprietary engines being used. How much longer will they be used who knows.
@@chillnspace777 They only look unique because they are being used by AAA developers. If the same developers used Unreal Engine it would probably look more unique.
@Velly2g it's the " aaa " that can afford to make those engines. I mean, unless they lease it out to indy studios. I'm there is an example besides death stranding out there.
In that regard RenderWare was quite versatile. It certainly wasn't as easy to guess whether a game ran (on it). For as complicated as it seemed to program for the PS2, all major studios did a great job optimizing their games on that engine: from the miracle that is GTA: SA; to the beautiful, fast and stable Burnout: Revenge; even great ports such as Killer7 -- the system owes it much - if not most - of its success.
I think it's worth mentioning that a lot of games from smaller developers in more niche genres will probably need to do more work to build their own tools or modify existing tools in order to meet their needs. RTS games, for example, can't really rely on Unreal or Unity as much as First Person Shooters or other popular genres with lots of open source support. Hell, the upcoming Age of Mythology Remake will apparently be made in its orginal engine.
I'm a junior dev working on optimization for an UE project. My experience is that the software architecture of UE makes simple tasks miserable. The engine is very clearly designed for a match based multiplayer shooter, and lots of base assumptions that derive from that are somewhat hardcoded into the engine. Implementing some optimizations can get very complex or very hacky. On the other hand, I've worked with Godot too, and optimizing things there is very easy because the engine architecture is not a spaghetti like UE's
I've grown to hate how UE engines look and animate. Homegrown engines, especially those used by Sony Devs look better, animate better, and are much better performers. ID Tech looks and performs well across the board. 4 plus years later I can pop in Doom Eternal and still say this looks good. Re Engine, looks good and performs well. However, it might be time for an upgrade. Dice engines, like ID Tech and RE Engines, look good and performs well all at high resolutions. UE engines games just looks odd to me and performs poorly, animations looks like they just caught up to Crysis 1 animations quality.
@@EJD339 I think it would just take too much time and effort. The engine is simply too big. Moreso, the core architecture based around Actors and Components is not actually very composable; the engine would be better if it had more straightforward structure, but if they changed that would it even be the same engine anymore?
@@hababacon Thats one thing I always notice about PlayStation games like Uncharted 4, Last of Us 2, Horizon: FW, Spiderman, Death Stranding, etc. The animations look so damn good. Especially something like what Naughty Dog does with physics driven character animations which look fucking insane. Uncharted 4 from 2016 is hands down still the best example of character movement animations I have ever seen. Its super clear these teams have tuned their own engines to be super specific to their own specific needs. So I can totally understand if something designed to work for a broad set of genres, platforms, and teams would be far less tuned to any one studios needs.
Decima is insanely amazing. I mean we haven’t even seen what it could look like with pathtracing let alone basic raytracing and it’s still manages to be at the top imo.
Decima currently doesn't support ray traced global illumination, so they had to use baked GI in Horizon FW. Which did look a bit off at times in my opinion. Northlight doesn't support open world games currently, the most difficult type of game for an engine. Snowdrop (used in Avatar) supports both advanced GI and performs well as an open world engine. But I would still say Snowdrop isn't quite as advanced as Unreal Engine 5, since the latter supports e.g. continuous LOD (at least for static meshes) which currently no other engine does.
@@cube2fox If u asked me nanite is the best UE feature. Right now thou, I avoid all UE games till this traversal stutter business gets solved one way or another.
RE engine still have problems with crowds & AI system that utilized massive amount of CPU power. So far, released games that utilized RE Engine are not big open world games. Dragon's Dogma 2 & MH Wilds will be the biggest test how well RE engine gonna fare in open worlds environment, in which might open the door for open world RE game somewhere in the future (new RE Outbreak open world?)
At the moment I am avoiding most of the UE games. Even avoided the WRC (by EA) that I had been actively waiting for over 1 year. In house engines, in my opinion are performing better and can display great visual prowess. Cyberpunk 2077, even though not my type of game, but I love the visuals in its current state (not the launch version). The scalability of visuals is amazing, you run it on steam deck as well, granted not at 60fps consistently but still. Yes there are exceptions, but mostly with in-house engines the devs know the limits and work-abouts of their proprietary engine.
Having diverse engines is awesome for the gaming industry period. Gamers don't know how huge a disservice they are doing to themselves and to the industry, by constantly pushing teams using their inhouse engines, to ditch them for UE5, or whatever. Having a diverse engine landscape, makes gaming tech improve much better and faster, because more people will have the skills to make it improve, we have the awesome engines and tech, we have today, because a bunch of people, was making game engines in the past and they pushed each other to improve. I predict that if all games start using one or two engines the gaming industry, will just crash or stagnate in the long run, because almost no one will know how to make engines anymore, Epic will have a hard time finding good engine engineers (I bet their best engineers are already in their high 30's or forties) and engine quality will nose dive.
It's not whether any proprietary in-house engine is better or not, it's the fact that creating a game with bespoke codes that you mostly wrote it yourself gives you the level of creative and technical control you wouldn't otherwise get easily on commercial ones such as UE, Cry Engine and the likes. Also theoretically, it's easier to optimize your own game based on an in-house developed engine because you're virtually unrestricted at defining specific parameters and the most efficient coding pipeline.
Capcom's pivot back to an in-house engine is a good example of this. Comparing Street Fighter V (Unreal 4) to Street Fighter 6 (RE Engine), there's a level of technical polish in the latter that seems to be missing in the former. The most obvious example was how the former had massive amounts of input delay when it launched, but there are smaller examples as well, such as how the latter loads faster with nearly instant rematches, or the fact that it doesn't suffer from network drift. You can tell how much more control the devs had with the in house engine.
You can add Frostbite to that latter list, which is a sad irony because it started life at DICE’s bespoke Battlefield engine and pushed so many boundaries before it was appropriated by EA.
To be honest they avoid most of the problems with proprietary engines because devs know what are the strong points of their engine and where it sucks ass. So they design experience around it. For some reason most of the teams using UE don't concider weak points of UE.
@@D3Vlicious Capcom didnt pivot shit, they've used MT Framework for 17 years! Only 4 of their titles were made in UE (DmC, MVCI, SFV and Asura's Wrath) and the explanation is always the same: none of these games were made solely in house. its cheaper, easier and faster to use a generic tool that everyone is already familiar with.
Not entirely. Unreal’s engine is also designed very messily compared to a simpler engine. So it makes it harder too. I don’t personally know about proprietary engines, but I presume they CAN be more organised and simple to work with.
All of my favourite games are built on proprietary engines. Northlight, 4A Engine, and Blam are all spring to mind and I’m upset that CDPR are moving over to Unreal with everything they accomplished. I can’t imagine the outrage there’d be if Rockstar left Rage.
latest version of RED Engine was way too ambitious & the devs basically suffered a two ways development hell between the actual game design & the tech design development. It was clearly very unhealthy for the company. I still remember how CDPR wanna develop a whole online spin off of CP2077, on top of already gonna have CP2077 with MP mode, using a game engine with zero history to be use for multiplayer or online system. Yeah...
RE Engine does scale very well, and so did MT Framework for that matter, Capcom have always featured a rich history of good, versatile, in-house game engines. Although I don't subscribe to the idea that Proprietary Game Engines always deliver the best results since it is very difficult (and expensive) building that kind of technology from the ground-up. During Seventh Gen, many studios crumbled trying to make their own HD technology that would get the most out of 720p/1080p visuals, Free Radical and Factor 5 immediately spring to mind here in this regard. With licenced technology, having the tools readily available opens up game development to so many more people. Besides, it isn't like this is a recent phenomenon either: Renderware was the preferred software engine for a massive chunk of sixth generation games - Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, Grand Theft Auto 3 and Suikoden 3 all used it, and Renderware did much of the complicated memory handling that otherwise was very difficult on PlayStation 2.
UE & Unity are also proprietary engines, they're just available for limited license to third-party developers, unlike the in-house engines you're describing that are for a developer's internal use only. The only non-proprietary engines are free/libre & open-source software (F/LOSS) engines like Godot, id Tech 1-4, etc. that are licensed under F/LOSS licenses like the GNU GPL, MIT, etc.
Better yet, if a studio's already using an in-house game engine, it should just respect its users' freedom/liberty - like Carmack did back in the day - & just release its engine's source code into the public under a F/LOSS license. Developers have nothing to lose by using F/LOSS game engines, since people want to buy their games for the actual games (fundamentally the art assets & game data, which can still be copyrighted & restricted) not their engines. @@IngrownMink4
@starfox14now Guerilla Games and Decima for Killzone and Horizon, Sony Santa Monica for God of War (specifically 3), Crysis and CryEngine, Naughty Dog. They're the ones pushing the limits each generation.
I think more game companies, especially AAA ones are realizing devs company in a big corporate system will have an easier project development & adaptation with UE, compare to their own in-house engines, especially for newly hires. Every major game design schools would have you either UE or Unity to use as basic learning tools for game design. I saw this AAA trend truly flourishing back from how Square Enix able to develop DQXI, KH3, & FFVIIR back to back using UE3/4 in the span of 3-4 years. It's such monumental changes for Square Enix & arguably influenced the Japan Game Industry as whole. Now we see almost every Bandai Namco games used UE4/5, one of the biggest Japanese game company.
If UE5 becomes THE industry standard game engine, games are going to start looking more like each other than they already do. It takes some very purposeful well-planned art direction to make a UE game look unique, but I’m afraid that AAA games are going to go straight for photorealism, because the tools are already there and it’s part of the UE5 hype train.
Also props to the new ModuleSystem, the Nintendo proprietary engine, both used in Tears of the Kingdom and in Mario Wonder, with excellent results (it might chug more with TotK, but it's kind of understandable due to the limitations of the hardware).
It's a double edged sword. Some games also suffer because a studio spent just as much time or more even, building their engine instead of a great game. The same can be said about trying to follow trends. Too many online shooters popped up for a while. Too much focus on making everything an open world. Trends don't always work for every franchise. In fact it can end a franchise just as quickly as making it successful. If every developer out there spent time building engines we would end up getting more tech demos than great games.
> Some games also suffer because a studio spent just as much time or more even, building their engine instead of a great game. For example, Square Enix with Crystal Tools engine.
Capcom’s RE Engine kind of acted as a form of rebranding and a modus operandi within the company. It’s great that a proprietary engine can both enhance a companies in-house technology while also stir up excitement. This combination acted as a very desirable package.
Short answer: Yes Exemples: Cyberpunk 2077 Alan Wake 2 Horizon Forbidden West Dice Games ( BF 1, BF 5 and Battlefront games) Crysis 3 still looks better than 90% of the games nowadays
@@abdelouadoudelkahali6678 I believe the biggest delay was CDPR had to modify the engine in ways that was not originally designed for (cars, dense buildings, etc). With Unreal they should be much more productive and that is the engine the next Witcher game will use.
I didn't know that Talos principle was an Unreal game, but I guessed it immediately simply based on the amount of stuttering it had on ps5 xD (Awesome game btw.)
Finally someone said it! Was about to type something similar and saw this as the first comment. Those developers are SEVERELY uderrated, not only did they nail a genre that no one else can handle as their first console game but they managed to make it run stutter free at 60fps on console on the Unreal engine, like Hello! Wakey wakey!
UE is an abysmal engine and needs to be abandoned. I’ve had nothing but stutter this generation with an rtx 3070, ryzen 7 3700x, Samsung 980 pro nvme ssd, 32 GB ram.
This was the prime example that came to my mind when I saw this topic. The graphics in the first game made my jaw drop, and I couldn't believe it was an in-house engine.
I like as many different game engines utilized as possible , same with physics , I want as large of a variety as possible In how games look and play , I don't want any streamlined "standard" game logic or overly shared engines/assets.
I long for the days when developers just made games, and those games, once made, provided the codebase (i.e., the "engine") for subsequent games moving forward. That's where all the major engines came from anyway, but it was an era of highly unique and creative games that pushed the boundaries of tech like nothing else. CDPR dropping their REDengine in favor of Unreal still makes me quite sad. I hope they will make it open source once they move away. That, along with the new modding kit they said they were working on, would greatly open up and expand modding for The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk.
Its optimisation was great, performed very well whilst still looking decent. Shame Kojima couldn't take his game engine with him when he left Konami to evolve it further, but the Decima engine used in Death Stranding was still great.
Unreal Engine 5 still has room for optimization improvements. In-house game engines like CD Projekt Red's Red Engine have shown the value of custom engines optimized for specific hardware. For example, on the PlayStation 3's Cell broadband engine, games built were often better optimized and looked a generation ahead of titles made with Unreal Engine on the same hardware. There will always be a place for proprietary engines tailored to each game's needs versus a one-size-fits-all solution like UE5. Developers who take the time to finely tune performance for their target platforms can achieve results that surpass generalized commercial engines.
I just replayed plague tale requiem which uses also uses an In house engine and is one of the best looking games I’ve ever seen. I know it takes a lot of time and money to create an engine but it seems to pay off in the long run.
Yeah, wasn’t Serious Sam 3: BFE the last game to use the serious engine? In my opinion, for Serious Sam 4 they could have stuck with Serious Engine 3.5 and I would have been happy. I think 3.5 still looks pretty decent these days, and the level of optimization is incredible. You can run the game on a potato and it still looks half decent while running pretty smoothly.
@@clutch7366 It was an exceptionally efficient and performant engine; I just loved the visuals they produced and the smooth framerates no matter what machine you ran it on. Croteam said in an interview that they decided to switch to UE5 once they saw Epic's demo of Nanite and Lumen--they felt they were going to be left behind if they didn't.
@@BaghaShams well nanite is perfect for games like Serious Sam. It works best for situations where you call multitude of the same objects. What is average fight in SS? 3-4 types of enemies on the screen x 50-100 units. Perfect for nanite.
Not being excited about a game's graphics simply due to its engine choice ("I know how it's made"), is something that happened to me for awhile. Of course you end up realizing that is silly, and you should be excited for great art even if you're able to pull back the curtain and see how the magic is made.
RE Engine, RAGE, Red Engine, Decima, whatever Naughty Dog call their engine. Unreal 5 is cool, but these are some of the most impressive and beautiful engines out there with great performance. RedDead 2, Last of Us 2, Horizon 2, Resident Evil 4. All incredible and distinctive.
Smaller studios, solo developers, and dev groups that consist of only a handful of people using engines like Unity and Unreal Engine make sense since to create your own engine requires even more work. It is disappointing seeing larger studios abandoning their in-house engines. CDPR, ATLUS, and Konami moving to Unreal Engine sucks. - The Red Engine was great and the problems with Cyberpunk likely had little to do with the engine it was built with. - When ATLUS shipped SMT V the last home console SMT game that it could be compared to was Nocturne on the PS2. The last SMT game to come out was, I believe, SMT IV Final/Apocalypse on the 3DS. Neither is a good comparison for what was lost and we only really saw what was gained, which was impressive over the 3DS games. Now with being able to compare Persona 5 Royal and Persona 3 Reload we see that performance in Reload really took a hit with the move to Unreal Engine. - For Konami the FOX engine is right there. Of course there is a possibility that key people who contributed to the FOX engine and understood the ins and outs left Konami to work at the new Kojima Productions, left the industry altogether, or moved to some other studio. But keeping in mind that the FOX engine ran at a solid 60fps while looking pretty good back in 2015 it comes across as impressive. On PC the game runs great and works well on relatively low-power hardware like the Steam Deck to run at a graphical level that often surpasses the PlayStation 4 version while maintaining 60fps.
I have seen no engine with more spectacular graphics than UE5. Then again, Sakura Rabbit pumps out visual content in Unity that simply blows your mind.
It saddens me that EA Motive is dropping Frostbite for Unreal 5 in the Iron Man game and CD Project Red their Red Engine for Witcher 4 using Unreal 5. Their Proprietary Engines gave us incredible results in the Dead Space Remake and Cyberpunk
In all honesty, I've been more impressed with games that were made with UE4 in terms of graphics and performance (compared to ones made with UE5). Lies of P, Stray, Gears 5, etc were all made with it and run exceptionally well with pristine graphics. The Coalition in particular seems to have the best results from using Unreal Engine and treats it like it's their own in-house engine. Having lumen and nanite is a nice addition, but those things are so costly to the GPU and often means dumbing down the graphics, at least on console, to the point where it negates the need to use them.
I think the problem with so many unreal games is that they're all using kit bash elements, animations, and basic blueprints. So many of them have a similar feel.
no doubt about it, but the way studios toss people away theres little to no point for a proprietary engine unless youre rockstar games, ubisoft, or activision/blizzard
A discussion that surfaces every now and then with the same answer each time. It's not about the engine, it's the artists & engineers working on a project.
UE5 seems to be meant for fast paced shooter games like Fortnite. Anytime it comes to single player games with huge open worlds amd tons of AI, the engine isn't built for it. This requires devs to make tons of workarounds which can eat up performance depending on the issue. With in-house made engines, the engine only has the required code to do what the devs want. They don't have to riddle their code with fixes and all. I think that is the biggest weakness of UE5, and honestly I don't see that changing. It's really sad to see these great engines die because UE5 is "better". UE5 won't get better until devs start leaving or complaining loud enough. It takes a lot of work to change and upgrade an engine, and Epic won't change that willfully.
??? have you seen the changes of ue5 most of the things are to help dev open world games with lots of AI. Also don't ever listen to this bunch of idiots that have said so many things actual game devs facepalm at DF all the time as they show they have never touched unreal in their life.
@@jacobpipersI was going to say UE4 has been used for many open world games Days gone has a really Dynamic world compared to other sony open world games.
All Unreal Engine games look to have the same grey dark gloss filter in them. They all look the same to me. Proprietary Game Engines have that unique aspect in them
I like the look of UE5 and think it does some cool stuff, but I would never want everything to be on a licensed engine. RE Engine might be the most efficient engine around and Decima can clearly do some cool things. I do think future game engines should make efficiency a priority at least as much as graphical fidelity. UE5, for all its strengths, makes some very heavy games at a time when we’re trying to tear down barriers to entry for gaming.
When Talos Principle 2 will be in VR then.. I will think about it.. until then.. I can still play the OG Talos Principle in VR! (and it's not UE based!)
I fear the thought of 343 Industries moving Halo to Unreal, while at the same time it might really help them with development. I don't know though, the thought worries me
What a strange video. All of these games use proprietary game engines. I think it's meant to discuss IN-HOUSE (RE Engine, Frostbite, etc.) engines vs OFF-THE-SHELF (Unity, Unreal, Crytek, etc.) engines. All of them are proprietary though. The amount of non-proprietary tech used in video games is some of lowest in the entire tech world I think.
I agree with Johns point. I hope we keep in house tech. I think the only reason companies are going UE is the fact that they can make games faster and saves more money. The end results is a game with Tourette syndrome. (No disrespect to the folks with Tourette syndrome 🙏) Though it worked in Final Fantasy, the TAA is SUPER soft. I'm not going to lie, I like playing certain games in FXAA over other implementations at times.
Not really, you get really good and extensive documentation, you get access to multitude tools with more added often, if you pay enough for license you get your own UE Epic engineers to help you with the game, Epic is ready to write or modify tools that already exist for your project (if it is big enough), etc.
@@korinogaro I agree, but that doesn't seem to be the case with the end results in games. Or else there wouldn't be videos like this. Using what you're saying, maybe these companies aren't paying enough for gamers to have a good experience on the games using UE5. I like UE games, they look great, just too much no FOUR much stutters are insane. I had to use a Mod to stop the stutters in FF7 Remake. A modder figured out what others have to call Epic to fix for a fee. Make it make sense.
I’m with John on this one. I don’t see in-house engines going. It does hurt to see the RED Engine get sacked for UE, I feel like it was just really starting to get there. And definitely a UE engine game is incredibly less interesting.
Combative much? The games could have had more graphical fidelity. Bloodborne and sekiro arguably are the best looking in the franchise. It doesn't mean more wasn't possible or even on the docket already at from. But efforts were put in more important areas. Pretending the games are perfect is stupid asf tho. No cap.
@@curbthepain Not being combative,i am just saying what From says and what you can see by interviews. ER had time of day so they pushed the volumetric lighting hard,giving the engine way more features and tools to deal with it,same thing for a post processing technique for laminated fur to make it easier for the artists,even rain now was a problem because of the open world so they had to deal with it too,this without talking about other non graphical aspects of the engine wich was also pushed forward like the mounting system,the spirit ash system and just overall tooling for the devs. And then they launch AC6 a year and a half later,with mostly the same tech team,the graphics programmers are the exact same,but now the game has to deal with a player that can move in 3d into the world and also move at fast speed while also dealing with bullet hell that dwarfs the amount of particles in other souls games, also having many of From biggest setpieces,and the most complex enemies in terms of animation tech,and smh was able to avoid the ER shader stutters. My point isnt that its perfect my point is that they push the engine every game the most they can for the game needs while also keeping a fast production cycle(they usually have 4 games in development at the same time,in varying levels of development),if from decides to make game that needs more fidelity they will push the engine in the direction. Another thing is that From is also conservative in memory,the games at their highest settings at 4k and with RT on uses at most 5,5GB of VRAM way less than contemporany games,the way From chooses to pack and to compress the textures is one of the reasons. Again my point isnt that its perfect,my point is that they already push the most they can per game.
@@lordanonimmo7699 I understand what you mean now. I do still wish the environments had been bigger in Armored Core 6. But given the time constraints and possible backlash I can understand why they didn't push the system requirements any higher to compensate. I'd also have to agree on the volumetric/lighting. Just from what I saw in game (especially Elden Ring). Volumetrics are the one setting that's guaranteed to boost the fps if lowered. But say goodbye to a lot of the artistic flair and fidelity.
I get what you guys mean, but for smaller companies UE5 saves them time. I am slowly getting through Robocop and it looks very good. Proprietary engines such as the RE engine are bloody amazing truth be told
I know this is Digital Foundry and all, but I think the focus goes way too hard on the technology rather than the game design. Yes, if a game is made in Unreal, it will use Unreal stuff; but it's like they are not interested in the actual game, just its technology.
Tech is what this channel is all about. They sometimes talk about game design but that is not what they usually do and not know for. Go watch other channels for that kind of stuff.
There are times when watching DF talk about anything, where this scene comes to mind from High Fidelity. And I will just leave it at that... Louis: You guys are snobs. Dick: No, we're not. Louis: Yeah, seriously, you're totally elitist. You feel like the unappreciated scholars, so you shit onto people who know lesser than you. Rob, Barry, Dick: No! Louis: Which is everybody... Rob, Barry, Dick: Yeah... Louis: That's so sad.
Even with the stutter I still think Unreal Engine is the way to go because it can make creators dreams and ideas into reality because the engines are well documented and the team doesn't have to spend resources trying to invent technology to make a scene or graphic possible in most cases. Proprietary engines like what Bethesda uses for instance DO NOT deliver the best graphics. Barely acceptable imo, but those games are amazing for other reasons. For the longest time unreal engine seemed like the golden standard. It has stutter these days but games still work without being a buggy mess. I don't know if DF ever covered it but Final Fantasy XV was essentially ruined by their own proprietary engine and was left an unfinished game BECAUSE of internal strife over the continued use of the company's outdated Square/White/Crystal tools engine. Famously I've read developer logs that they just couldn't make the E3 trailer possible like the Leviathan boss fight trailer due to engine limitations so the actual boss fight the game shipped with was radically different and very out of place. Trying to make things work that couldn't took time and money and ruined the final product and their chances of properly finishing the story and game. If they used Unreal which they said they would a few years back for their new games, I think the game would have been in a significantly better place. Even if it had large traversal stutter it would have had significantly more story and probably be more cohesive and probably have the actual Leviathan boss fight from the E3 trailer.
UE5 is a huge improvement for The Talos Principle 2 over Serious Engine, especially when you look at the most recent iterations of Serious Engine. If devs aren't going to implement mesh shader (only one has in 5 years), a decent RT lighting solution, or a distance based level streaming system, then they might as well go with UE5.
the thing I appreciate about proprietary engines is that they can truly tailor every aspect of the final image to the needs of the project. I love a ton of games that are made in UE4 and 5 to death, but I cannot FUCKING stand the intense movement vector based post processing to resolve every frame. From denoising reflections and lighting and dithered transparency to antialiasing. I cannot fucking stand it. I yearn for at least ONE rasterized "old school" renderer that uses well-worn tricks along SIDE modern innovations and standards to create images with completely different character and clarity. Like Source 2! CS2 and HLA both shy away from temporal based artifact reduction effects, and they both have an unparalleled clarity among pretty much all modern AAA games. Same with Bungie's engine for Destiny. Same with 343's adaptation of Bungie's tech for the modern Halos!
Unreal fatigue in gaming is/will be similar to superhero fatigue in movies. For me the only UE5 game which looks somewhat interesting is Tekken 8 and that's mainly because of it's over the top and flashy character design which helps to mask the blandness of UE5. Yes UE5 is impressive from a technical point of view... but 90% of the time it looks so boring and vanilla. It embodies the term 'content'. I'm 35 so I remember the time when each game looked different. Don't get me wrong, licensed engines were a thing even in the past (Quake engine, UE2, and Renderware) but the art style of these games was often very different.
Definitely for consoles, not sure on the PC side but for the 11 year old PlayStation 4 some of the games naughty dog and insomniac has made for the target hardware is amazing. The PlayStation 4 is nowhere near cutting edge anymore and I'm not sure if it was at launch but TLOU2 looks amazing (litterly just finished it in December) but then again nintendo would be my personal favourite developers, what nintendo puts on time and time again on switch can't help me smile hard. Tears of the kingdom is my favourite game ever within 41 years of gaming. UE games always look the same to me The Re engine is something special though .
Unreal 5 just like previous Unreal Engines...and general life. Mass market things in life being mass efficient and easy to sell products... Personally, I love the proprietary engines. I love to see the tech and details, what these engines do differently. Sony's first party generally use their own right?
Yeah almost all Sony studios use a in house engine. I think only Firesprite, Housemarque are confirmed to be using Unreal Engine for their upcoming projects
For me unreal 5 feels very behind. We had horizon zero west and ratched and clank as launch games wich looked great. Now you have jedi survivor with super low textures that sometimes never load in and low performance level.
The effort, workforce and budget required in comparison to how much return a proprietary engine gives scales badly considering how little it can be utilized nowadays. Games take longer to create and engines get outdated quicker. To the point that a studio needs to completely revamp an engine every time they make a game unless they're working several games simultaneously with the same one. And considering how people love exclaiming "it's their engine's problem!" every time something goes wrong, it's not worth the hassle. By 2030 it'll be a very rare thing reserved for the biggest studios who can get their money's worth out of it thru 3-4 projects that can be released in a row.
For inage quality you'd always be better off with dlss. Frame gen is great, though. There is a mod that allows DLSS with fsr3 frame gen though for the best of both worlds for Nvidia users. Google dlss to fsr mod.
Frostbite in Dead Space was a huge stuttery mess but I guess it was an outsourced engine. I’m so over stutter that I thinking taking a break from gaming while PCs r dumb expensive and games r terribly unoptimised messes and unfinished might be the right move.
@@BEPlifestyle On PC going through a door makes it feel like Im about to crash. I’m above the reccomended spec too. Just over it. Even the best PCs like they demonstrated still have it bad (aka a 4090). The only way to get away from it is to not play games from 2023 onwards, on PC lol. I would play on a console for stuff like Jedi survivor (since that’s way better on console) but that’s just way too expensive and would hate to split my library of games in 2 different places.
I really don't see every company switching to unreal. For instance, Bethesda is probably going to continue to use the Creation Engine since it does allow them to easily cater to there large modding community in a way that a 3rd party engine would not. And yes, I know they could rebuild all there tools in unreal but they could spend half those resources improving there own engine. Unreal engine is also not well suited to making games which support older hardware. You can get them to work but its going to be more work than an engine that is suited to that older hardware. Lastly, and the biggest reason I don't use unreal, is the workflow sucks. I personally don't need the billion or so features unreal provides so its just overkill for no real benefit.
To answer the question, I'd say no. It looks good because it's fresh looking compared to Unreal Engine, which looks stale in comparison. Also, a proprietary game engine has a specific use case that devs can focus on while UE is for everyone, so everything has to be put in and less time is spent on graphics. Also, has anyone ever took the source code and modified the graphics part? It would make sense since the source code is available.
Talos Principle 2 is really incredible looking from a visual and artistic standpoint. I also thought it was the best game of 2023, so that's something to consider.
IMO Croteam could had made The Talos Principle 2 in the Serious engine 4 or newer and I'm pretty sure it would look equally good and play equally well but alas they were probably forced to ditch their inhouse engine and change to UE5, because their main engine developer for reasons, decided to quit and go work on game streaming and VR stuff and like I said in another comment, today is very hard to find good engine engineers.
@@KingSigy No Serious Engine 4 has no raytracing, I would bet money that was not the main reason for leaving the engine behind but who knows, only them. One thing I'm pretty sure the departure of Alen Ladavac (the guy that created the Serious Engine) most add a big influence on their decision.
It's not open source, simply public source. The difference matters exactly for the question of if the engine is proprietary, as it means they can effectively charge for the simple use of the engine (you *can* sell open source software, but it's complicated and generally means selling support for the software instead) The exact differences are a bit fiddly, but IIRC basically you can't show large (>10 lines?) chunks of unreal source code to anyone who hasn't also agreed to the terms, you can make derivative code and distribute binaries built from it without distributing the code (in fact, you must not), and you must pay Epic a fraction of your income. All of these are inconsistent with the open source definition.
Indeed, I don't think the video title is right. Almost all game engines used in big games are proprietary. Godot in one of the few ones I know of that isn't.
@@exscape They should've used Private Game Engines instead of the word Proprietary. Engines like Snowdrop, Frostbite, and RedEngine are company-exclusive and are only distributed within the company while engines like Unity and Unreal Engine are publicly available for anyone's use.
@@exscape despite my answer, context matters; Unreal is proprietary to Epic, not the developers of these games, so asking if games are being developed with proprietary engines is asking if the games are being developed using an engine that the developer owns, not if the engine is proprietary software.
Everytime I read a game it's done with Unreal Engine, makes mi interest in the game decrease. It's not exciting anymore. And a lot of times to me feels like the engine was not developed for the game or not used correctly, I don't really know, but just doesn't fit the game. Having a propietary engine for me it's a lot better because they know what the engine can do and how to tweak and polish everything and was developed for the game in cuestion, it just fits better. So in-house engines for me.
It takes ages to become productive in any engine. Once you know a tool inside out, you don't want to switch and lose time on another arduous learning curve.
A company rolling its own engine implies three things that can contribute to good visuals. One, they have the technical skill to actually pull that rabbit out of the hat, and having deep subject matter experts on your rendering team is rarely a bad thing. Two, they likely have a strong personal investment in the quality of what they're making, it's a huge commitment and probably not financially optimal for most studios. Three, the engine is likely specifically catered to the kind of art its intended to render.
I guess a MiddleWare to handle graphics, storage, input, audio, networking, ... would have much more value for the game industry and I think this is how RenderWare worked.
@@vitordelima That is what the Ogre engine was made for and is now unfortunately dying, it is only a render engine and some game companies have used it and even made comercial engines on top of it. One famous team that used Ogre for some cool games was the hill fated Runic Games.
@@Argoon1981OpenMW used it then migrated to OpenSceneGraph (also dead, but it seems to have a Vulkan version now).
I've seen metaphors that compared engines like DICE's Frostbite to a Formula 1 car while Unreal was compared to an SUV.
Neither of them are bad, one is just far more specialized and tailor built to a specific purpose while the other was made to be a "do it all" workhorse.
@@vitordelima Or you can simply use Unreal Engine as MiddleWare. What do you think how new Tekken or Mortal Kombat works, given two examples.
I think games with a proprietary engines tend to look more unique.
Until you see AAA studios use Unreal Engine. Proprietary engines will die out because it's always easier to get your tech from other companies.
@@Velly2gok. That doesn't apply to what Jaman said 😂. It's refreshing to see proprietary engines being used. How much longer will they be used who knows.
this !
@@chillnspace777 They only look unique because they are being used by AAA developers. If the same developers used Unreal Engine it would probably look more unique.
@Velly2g it's the " aaa " that can afford to make those engines. I mean, unless they lease it out to indy studios. I'm there is an example besides death stranding out there.
In that regard RenderWare was quite versatile. It certainly wasn't as easy to guess whether a game ran (on it).
For as complicated as it seemed to program for the PS2, all major studios did a great job optimizing their games on that engine: from the miracle that is GTA: SA; to the beautiful, fast and stable Burnout: Revenge; even great ports such as Killer7 -- the system owes it much - if not most - of its success.
I think it's worth mentioning that a lot of games from smaller developers in more niche genres will probably need to do more work to build their own tools or modify existing tools in order to meet their needs. RTS games, for example, can't really rely on Unreal or Unity as much as First Person Shooters or other popular genres with lots of open source support. Hell, the upcoming Age of Mythology Remake will apparently be made in its orginal engine.
I'm a junior dev working on optimization for an UE project. My experience is that the software architecture of UE makes simple tasks miserable. The engine is very clearly designed for a match based multiplayer shooter, and lots of base assumptions that derive from that are somewhat hardcoded into the engine. Implementing some optimizations can get very complex or very hacky.
On the other hand, I've worked with Godot too, and optimizing things there is very easy because the engine architecture is not a spaghetti like UE's
Would there be a way for UE5 to fix that or is it just too engrained in the engine it may cause more problems than it fixes?
I've grown to hate how UE engines look and animate. Homegrown engines, especially those used by Sony Devs look better, animate better, and are much better performers. ID Tech looks and performs well across the board. 4 plus years later I can pop in Doom Eternal and still say this looks good. Re Engine, looks good and performs well. However, it might be time for an upgrade. Dice engines, like ID Tech and RE Engines, look good and performs well all at high resolutions. UE engines games just looks odd to me and performs poorly, animations looks like they just caught up to Crysis 1 animations quality.
@@EJD339 I think it would just take too much time and effort. The engine is simply too big. Moreso, the core architecture based around Actors and Components is not actually very composable; the engine would be better if it had more straightforward structure, but if they changed that would it even be the same engine anymore?
Unreal Engine is also quite old at this point, while Godot is fairly new. You'd expect the UE core architecture to be a bit antiquated by now.
@@hababacon Thats one thing I always notice about PlayStation games like Uncharted 4, Last of Us 2, Horizon: FW, Spiderman, Death Stranding, etc. The animations look so damn good. Especially something like what Naughty Dog does with physics driven character animations which look fucking insane. Uncharted 4 from 2016 is hands down still the best example of character movement animations I have ever seen. Its super clear these teams have tuned their own engines to be super specific to their own specific needs. So I can totally understand if something designed to work for a broad set of genres, platforms, and teams would be far less tuned to any one studios needs.
northlight and decima are the Best looking ones in my opinion
Magic of writing engine designed to only run on big machines.
Decima is insanely amazing. I mean we haven’t even seen what it could look like with pathtracing let alone basic raytracing and it’s still manages to be at the top imo.
northlight has amazing destruction physics as well.
Decima currently doesn't support ray traced global illumination, so they had to use baked GI in Horizon FW. Which did look a bit off at times in my opinion.
Northlight doesn't support open world games currently, the most difficult type of game for an engine.
Snowdrop (used in Avatar) supports both advanced GI and performs well as an open world engine.
But I would still say Snowdrop isn't quite as advanced as Unreal Engine 5, since the latter supports e.g. continuous LOD (at least for static meshes) which currently no other engine does.
@@cube2fox If u asked me nanite is the best UE feature. Right now thou, I avoid all UE games till this traversal stutter business gets solved one way or another.
Decima engine and Naughty Dog’s in house engine are my favorite ones.
The RE engine clears out the competition every day of the week. That engine is magical.
RE and Decima are the two best hands down
Except their anti aliasing. They actually think FXAA + TAA looks good. Worst I've seen.
Id tech 7 was also really impressive when doom eternal launched
Capcom always had the best engine tech just check out back in the day when dead rising 1 came out and compare it to what was on the market
RE engine still have problems with crowds & AI system that utilized massive amount of CPU power. So far, released games that utilized RE Engine are not big open world games. Dragon's Dogma 2 & MH Wilds will be the biggest test how well RE engine gonna fare in open worlds environment, in which might open the door for open world RE game somewhere in the future (new RE Outbreak open world?)
At the moment I am avoiding most of the UE games. Even avoided the WRC (by EA) that I had been actively waiting for over 1 year.
In house engines, in my opinion are performing better and can display great visual prowess.
Cyberpunk 2077, even though not my type of game, but I love the visuals in its current state (not the launch version). The scalability of visuals is amazing, you run it on steam deck as well, granted not at 60fps consistently but still.
Yes there are exceptions, but mostly with in-house engines the devs know the limits and work-abouts of their proprietary engine.
Unreal Engije is overrated, Cryengine looks much better.
@@mitchjames9350Kingdom come looks great on that engine.
Having diverse engines is awesome for the gaming industry period. Gamers don't know how huge a disservice they are doing to themselves and to the industry, by constantly pushing teams using their inhouse engines, to ditch them for UE5, or whatever.
Having a diverse engine landscape, makes gaming tech improve much better and faster, because more people will have the skills to make it improve, we have the awesome engines and tech, we have today, because a bunch of people, was making game engines in the past and they pushed each other to improve.
I predict that if all games start using one or two engines the gaming industry, will just crash or stagnate in the long run, because almost no one will know how to make engines anymore, Epic will have a hard time finding good engine engineers (I bet their best engineers are already in their high 30's or forties) and engine quality will nose dive.
It's not whether any proprietary in-house engine is better or not, it's the fact that creating a game with bespoke codes that you mostly wrote it yourself gives you the level of creative and technical control you wouldn't otherwise get easily on commercial ones such as UE, Cry Engine and the likes. Also theoretically, it's easier to optimize your own game based on an in-house developed engine because you're virtually unrestricted at defining specific parameters and the most efficient coding pipeline.
Capcom's pivot back to an in-house engine is a good example of this. Comparing Street Fighter V (Unreal 4) to Street Fighter 6 (RE Engine), there's a level of technical polish in the latter that seems to be missing in the former. The most obvious example was how the former had massive amounts of input delay when it launched, but there are smaller examples as well, such as how the latter loads faster with nearly instant rematches, or the fact that it doesn't suffer from network drift. You can tell how much more control the devs had with the in house engine.
You can add Frostbite to that latter list, which is a sad irony because it started life at DICE’s bespoke Battlefield engine and pushed so many boundaries before it was appropriated by EA.
To be honest they avoid most of the problems with proprietary engines because devs know what are the strong points of their engine and where it sucks ass. So they design experience around it. For some reason most of the teams using UE don't concider weak points of UE.
@@D3Vlicious Capcom didnt pivot shit, they've used MT Framework for 17 years! Only 4 of their titles were made in UE (DmC, MVCI, SFV and Asura's Wrath) and the explanation is always the same: none of these games were made solely in house. its cheaper, easier and faster to use a generic tool that everyone is already familiar with.
Not entirely. Unreal’s engine is also designed very messily compared to a simpler engine. So it makes it harder too. I don’t personally know about proprietary engines, but I presume they CAN be more organised and simple to work with.
The best looking game to me is Battlefront 2015. Endor is just gorgeous. Even 9 years later.
Weird. I thought Battlefront 2 (2017) was a clear step up to the first one.
@@HerZeL3iDza they had some better lighting but the textures were worse. The first one had photography so it had way better detail.
Aren't they Frost?
Frostbite FTW!
@@ooospaceooo yeah autocorrect
'game performance supervisor' should be a job position on any game development
Respawn devs: “I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that”
Yas, Yet another supervisor :,V
Tell me you don’t understand without telling me you don’t understand
@@George-um2vcyou: *fingers asshole furiously to Catholic priest and altar boy*
it is so easy for us throw some opinion even we know nothing, and its shows
All of my favourite games are built on proprietary engines. Northlight, 4A Engine, and Blam are all spring to mind and I’m upset that CDPR are moving over to Unreal with everything they accomplished. I can’t imagine the outrage there’d be if Rockstar left Rage.
latest version of RED Engine was way too ambitious & the devs basically suffered a two ways development hell between the actual game design & the tech design development. It was clearly very unhealthy for the company. I still remember how CDPR wanna develop a whole online spin off of CP2077, on top of already gonna have CP2077 with MP mode, using a game engine with zero history to be use for multiplayer or online system. Yeah...
@@crozravenThey need Cyberpunk online to help cover the cost of making Their games.
Rockstar leaving Rage would really piss me off its such a great engine for open world games the Physics are top notch.
Also the AI@@Ronuk1996
RE Engine does scale very well, and so did MT Framework for that matter, Capcom have always featured a rich history of good, versatile, in-house game engines. Although I don't subscribe to the idea that Proprietary Game Engines always deliver the best results since it is very difficult (and expensive) building that kind of technology from the ground-up. During Seventh Gen, many studios crumbled trying to make their own HD technology that would get the most out of 720p/1080p visuals, Free Radical and Factor 5 immediately spring to mind here in this regard. With licenced technology, having the tools readily available opens up game development to so many more people. Besides, it isn't like this is a recent phenomenon either: Renderware was the preferred software engine for a massive chunk of sixth generation games - Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, Grand Theft Auto 3 and Suikoden 3 all used it, and Renderware did much of the complicated memory handling that otherwise was very difficult on PlayStation 2.
Burnout 3 also benefited from it. Some of the most beautiful games of that generation used that software.
UE & Unity are also proprietary engines, they're just available for limited license to third-party developers, unlike the in-house engines you're describing that are for a developer's internal use only. The only non-proprietary engines are free/libre & open-source software (F/LOSS) engines like Godot, id Tech 1-4, etc. that are licensed under F/LOSS licenses like the GNU GPL, MIT, etc.
More studios should try using F/LOSS game engines IMO.
Better yet, if a studio's already using an in-house game engine, it should just respect its users' freedom/liberty - like Carmack did back in the day - & just release its engine's source code into the public under a F/LOSS license. Developers have nothing to lose by using F/LOSS game engines, since people want to buy their games for the actual games (fundamentally the art assets & game data, which can still be copyrighted & restricted) not their engines. @@IngrownMink4
The best looking games on the last few console generations have all used in-house engines.
wrong.
@starfox14now Guerilla Games and Decima for Killzone and Horizon, Sony Santa Monica for God of War (specifically 3), Crysis and CryEngine, Naughty Dog.
They're the ones pushing the limits each generation.
@@NRobbi42 you can add RAGE and RDR2 to that list. Still one of the best looking games 5 years later
Sony garbage isn't a point.
@@starfox14now Crysis is my favorite Sony game
You should do a video into game engines. Could be an interesting deep dive.
The kind of deep dive i've been expecting from techtube for YEARS
DF Retro quality production specifically about game engines throughout the history of the medium
I think more game companies, especially AAA ones are realizing devs company in a big corporate system will have an easier project development & adaptation with UE, compare to their own in-house engines, especially for newly hires. Every major game design schools would have you either UE or Unity to use as basic learning tools for game design.
I saw this AAA trend truly flourishing back from how Square Enix able to develop DQXI, KH3, & FFVIIR back to back using UE3/4 in the span of 3-4 years. It's such monumental changes for Square Enix & arguably influenced the Japan Game Industry as whole. Now we see almost every Bandai Namco games used UE4/5, one of the biggest Japanese game company.
Bandai Namco started developing a engine for internal use.😊
If UE5 becomes THE industry standard game engine, games are going to start looking more like each other than they already do. It takes some very purposeful well-planned art direction to make a UE game look unique, but I’m afraid that AAA games are going to go straight for photorealism, because the tools are already there and it’s part of the UE5 hype train.
You can have dozens of games going for photorealism and not looking alike.
Also props to the new ModuleSystem, the Nintendo proprietary engine, both used in Tears of the Kingdom and in Mario Wonder, with excellent results (it might chug more with TotK, but it's kind of understandable due to the limitations of the hardware).
It's a double edged sword. Some games also suffer because a studio spent just as much time or more even, building their engine instead of a great game. The same can be said about trying to follow trends. Too many online shooters popped up for a while. Too much focus on making everything an open world. Trends don't always work for every franchise. In fact it can end a franchise just as quickly as making it successful. If every developer out there spent time building engines we would end up getting more tech demos than great games.
> Some games also suffer because a studio spent just as much time or more even, building their engine instead of a great game.
For example, Square Enix with Crystal Tools engine.
Capcom’s RE Engine kind of acted as a form of rebranding and a modus operandi within the company. It’s great that a proprietary engine can both enhance a companies in-house technology while also stir up excitement. This combination acted as a very desirable package.
It seems to produce the most consistent results, but not all studios have one, so it's good that Unity and Unreal(and others) are available
Short answer: Yes
Exemples:
Cyberpunk 2077
Alan Wake 2
Horizon Forbidden West
Dice Games ( BF 1, BF 5 and Battlefront games)
Crysis 3 still looks better than 90% of the games nowadays
Yet CD Project Red decided to go Unreal for their next game
thats sad :´(@@deanwilliams433
yeah :´( @@deanwilliams433
@dean why?williams433
@@abdelouadoudelkahali6678 I believe the biggest delay was CDPR had to modify the engine in ways that was not originally designed for (cars, dense buildings, etc). With Unreal they should be much more productive and that is the engine the next Witcher game will use.
AC Unity was amazing!
The peak of the series in terms of gameplay and the world
Forzatech for Fable looks amazing. I really hope we don’t lose in house engines as it puts the developers fingerprints on the game.
I didn't know that Talos principle was an Unreal game, but I guessed it immediately simply based on the amount of stuttering it had on ps5 xD (Awesome game btw.)
Another game with that Unreal performance lol.
Lies of p is stutter-free but it was made in UE 4
Yea and its a Great looking Game 😊
Never wouldve believed it was UE4 until I saw the confirmation. This is proof the engine is limited by the people behind it
Finally someone said it! Was about to type something similar and saw this as the first comment. Those developers are SEVERELY uderrated, not only did they nail a genre that no one else can handle as their first console game but they managed to make it run stutter free at 60fps on console on the Unreal engine, like Hello! Wakey wakey!
Thats not what I have heard or seen
UE is an abysmal engine and needs to be abandoned. I’ve had nothing but stutter this generation with an rtx 3070, ryzen 7 3700x, Samsung 980 pro nvme ssd, 32 GB ram.
To add to the list, A Plague's Tales (both games) use a proprietary engine to great effect as well (Sorry.. the name slips)
This was the prime example that came to my mind when I saw this topic. The graphics in the first game made my jaw drop, and I couldn't believe it was an in-house engine.
I like as many different game engines utilized as possible , same with physics , I want as large of a variety as possible In how games look and play , I don't want any streamlined "standard" game logic or overly shared engines/assets.
I long for the days when developers just made games, and those games, once made, provided the codebase (i.e., the "engine") for subsequent games moving forward. That's where all the major engines came from anyway, but it was an era of highly unique and creative games that pushed the boundaries of tech like nothing else.
CDPR dropping their REDengine in favor of Unreal still makes me quite sad. I hope they will make it open source once they move away. That, along with the new modding kit they said they were working on, would greatly open up and expand modding for The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk.
It's a shame the Fox engine going to waste. I thought MGS5 had rather nice things going on at the time.
Underrated comment
Its optimisation was great, performed very well whilst still looking decent. Shame Kojima couldn't take his game engine with him when he left Konami to evolve it further, but the Decima engine used in Death Stranding was still great.
60 fps with everything going on, great engine.
@@ikwilgeenkanaalzeur yeah that and the game play was buttery smooth 👌
Well, it was used on PES and eFootball, right?
1:10 I caught that little smirk after he said “UE5 spreads its load”
Lol same
Unreal Engine 5 still has room for optimization improvements. In-house game engines like CD Projekt Red's Red Engine have shown the value of custom engines optimized for specific hardware. For example, on the PlayStation 3's Cell broadband engine, games built were often better optimized and looked a generation ahead of titles made with Unreal Engine on the same hardware. There will always be a place for proprietary engines tailored to each game's needs versus a one-size-fits-all solution like UE5. Developers who take the time to finely tune performance for their target platforms can achieve results that surpass generalized commercial engines.
I just replayed plague tale requiem which uses also uses an In house engine and is one of the best looking games I’ve ever seen. I know it takes a lot of time and money to create an engine but it seems to pay off in the long run.
It was also the year when Croteam abandoned their (awesome, decades-long) in-house engine and switched to UE...
Yeah, wasn’t Serious Sam 3: BFE the last game to use the serious engine? In my opinion, for Serious Sam 4 they could have stuck with Serious Engine 3.5 and I would have been happy. I think 3.5 still looks pretty decent these days, and the level of optimization is incredible. You can run the game on a potato and it still looks half decent while running pretty smoothly.
@@clutch7366 It was an exceptionally efficient and performant engine; I just loved the visuals they produced and the smooth framerates no matter what machine you ran it on. Croteam said in an interview that they decided to switch to UE5 once they saw Epic's demo of Nanite and Lumen--they felt they were going to be left behind if they didn't.
@@BaghaShams well nanite is perfect for games like Serious Sam. It works best for situations where you call multitude of the same objects. What is average fight in SS? 3-4 types of enemies on the screen x 50-100 units. Perfect for nanite.
@@clutch7366 Serious Sam 4 and Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem used the latest iteration of the Serious Engine.
@korinogaro Nanite doesn't work for enemies because it doesn't yet support the necessary dynamic meshes.
*Reads title
"YES!"
cyberpunk red engine was brilliant through and through
No, it wasn't.
is that why its being ditched? rt does not = good engine dummy, its broken
Not being excited about a game's graphics simply due to its engine choice ("I know how it's made"), is something that happened to me for awhile. Of course you end up realizing that is silly, and you should be excited for great art even if you're able to pull back the curtain and see how the magic is made.
RE Engine, RAGE, Red Engine, Decima, whatever Naughty Dog call their engine. Unreal 5 is cool, but these are some of the most impressive and beautiful engines out there with great performance. RedDead 2, Last of Us 2, Horizon 2, Resident Evil 4. All incredible and distinctive.
Smaller studios, solo developers, and dev groups that consist of only a handful of people using engines like Unity and Unreal Engine make sense since to create your own engine requires even more work. It is disappointing seeing larger studios abandoning their in-house engines. CDPR, ATLUS, and Konami moving to Unreal Engine sucks.
- The Red Engine was great and the problems with Cyberpunk likely had little to do with the engine it was built with.
- When ATLUS shipped SMT V the last home console SMT game that it could be compared to was Nocturne on the PS2. The last SMT game to come out was, I believe, SMT IV Final/Apocalypse on the 3DS. Neither is a good comparison for what was lost and we only really saw what was gained, which was impressive over the 3DS games. Now with being able to compare Persona 5 Royal and Persona 3 Reload we see that performance in Reload really took a hit with the move to Unreal Engine.
- For Konami the FOX engine is right there. Of course there is a possibility that key people who contributed to the FOX engine and understood the ins and outs left Konami to work at the new Kojima Productions, left the industry altogether, or moved to some other studio. But keeping in mind that the FOX engine ran at a solid 60fps while looking pretty good back in 2015 it comes across as impressive. On PC the game runs great and works well on relatively low-power hardware like the Steam Deck to run at a graphical level that often surpasses the PlayStation 4 version while maintaining 60fps.
I have seen no engine with more spectacular graphics than UE5. Then again, Sakura Rabbit pumps out visual content in Unity that simply blows your mind.
It saddens me that EA Motive is dropping Frostbite for Unreal 5 in the Iron Man game and CD Project Red their Red Engine for Witcher 4 using Unreal 5. Their Proprietary Engines gave us incredible results in the Dead Space Remake and Cyberpunk
In all honesty, I've been more impressed with games that were made with UE4 in terms of graphics and performance (compared to ones made with UE5). Lies of P, Stray, Gears 5, etc were all made with it and run exceptionally well with pristine graphics. The Coalition in particular seems to have the best results from using Unreal Engine and treats it like it's their own in-house engine.
Having lumen and nanite is a nice addition, but those things are so costly to the GPU and often means dumbing down the graphics, at least on console, to the point where it negates the need to use them.
You mean Gears 5 but yes, I second what you say
@@Kooleman oops, yes. Thanks for the heads up 😊
Agree! UE4 can have great graphics and run really well 😃
I think the problem with so many unreal games is that they're all using kit bash elements, animations, and basic blueprints. So many of them have a similar feel.
no doubt about it, but the way studios toss people away theres little to no point for a proprietary engine unless youre rockstar games, ubisoft, or activision/blizzard
A discussion that surfaces every now and then with the same answer each time. It's not about the engine, it's the artists & engineers working on a project.
UE5 seems to be meant for fast paced shooter games like Fortnite. Anytime it comes to single player games with huge open worlds amd tons of AI, the engine isn't built for it. This requires devs to make tons of workarounds which can eat up performance depending on the issue. With in-house made engines, the engine only has the required code to do what the devs want. They don't have to riddle their code with fixes and all. I think that is the biggest weakness of UE5, and honestly I don't see that changing.
It's really sad to see these great engines die because UE5 is "better". UE5 won't get better until devs start leaving or complaining loud enough. It takes a lot of work to change and upgrade an engine, and Epic won't change that willfully.
???
have you seen the changes of ue5 most of the things are to help dev open world games with lots of AI. Also don't ever listen to this bunch of idiots that have said so many things actual game devs facepalm at DF all the time as they show they have never touched unreal in their life.
@@jacobpipersI was going to say UE4 has been used for many open world games Days gone has a really Dynamic world compared to other sony open world games.
All Unreal Engine games look to have the same grey dark gloss filter in them. They all look the same to me. Proprietary Game Engines have that unique aspect in them
I like the look of UE5 and think it does some cool stuff, but I would never want everything to be on a licensed engine. RE Engine might be the most efficient engine around and Decima can clearly do some cool things. I do think future game engines should make efficiency a priority at least as much as graphical fidelity. UE5, for all its strengths, makes some very heavy games at a time when we’re trying to tear down barriers to entry for gaming.
It's wird how fast ue5 come from next gen to current gen, and it's just average visuals now
1:11 it’s what…..🤨
When Talos Principle 2 will be in VR then.. I will think about it.. until then.. I can still play the OG Talos Principle in VR! (and it's not UE based!)
I fear the thought of 343 Industries moving Halo to Unreal, while at the same time it might really help them with development. I don't know though, the thought worries me
They wasted a lot of time and money on Slipspace for nothing :S
What a strange video. All of these games use proprietary game engines. I think it's meant to discuss IN-HOUSE (RE Engine, Frostbite, etc.) engines vs OFF-THE-SHELF (Unity, Unreal, Crytek, etc.) engines. All of them are proprietary though. The amount of non-proprietary tech used in video games is some of lowest in the entire tech world I think.
I agree with Johns point. I hope we keep in house tech. I think the only reason companies are going UE is the fact that they can make games faster and saves more money. The end results is a game with Tourette syndrome. (No disrespect to the folks with Tourette syndrome 🙏) Though it worked in Final Fantasy, the TAA is SUPER soft. I'm not going to lie, I like playing certain games in FXAA over other implementations at times.
Not really, you get really good and extensive documentation, you get access to multitude tools with more added often, if you pay enough for license you get your own UE Epic engineers to help you with the game, Epic is ready to write or modify tools that already exist for your project (if it is big enough), etc.
@@korinogaro I agree, but that doesn't seem to be the case with the end results in games. Or else there wouldn't be videos like this. Using what you're saying, maybe these companies aren't paying enough for gamers to have a good experience on the games using UE5. I like UE games, they look great, just too much no FOUR much stutters are insane. I had to use a Mod to stop the stutters in FF7 Remake. A modder figured out what others have to call Epic to fix for a fee. Make it make sense.
Semantics perhaps, but did you mean Parkinson’s instead?
I’m with John on this one. I don’t see in-house engines going.
It does hurt to see the RED Engine get sacked for UE, I feel like it was just really starting to get there.
And definitely a UE engine game is incredibly less interesting.
I wish fromsoft would push their engine more but i sure am glad eldenring and armored core are so stable now.
From pushes their engine as much as they need for the game,artists and to be made on time.
Combative much? The games could have had more graphical fidelity. Bloodborne and sekiro arguably are the best looking in the franchise. It doesn't mean more wasn't possible or even on the docket already at from. But efforts were put in more important areas. Pretending the games are perfect is stupid asf tho. No cap.
@@curbthepain Not being combative,i am just saying what From says and what you can see by interviews.
ER had time of day so they pushed the volumetric lighting hard,giving the engine way more features and tools to deal with it,same thing for a post processing technique for laminated fur to make it easier for the artists,even rain now was a problem because of the open world so they had to deal with it too,this without talking about other non graphical aspects of the engine wich was also pushed forward like the mounting system,the spirit ash system and just overall tooling for the devs.
And then they launch AC6 a year and a half later,with mostly the same tech team,the graphics programmers are the exact same,but now the game has to deal with a player that can move in 3d into the world and also move at fast speed while also dealing with bullet hell that dwarfs the amount of particles in other souls games, also having many of From biggest setpieces,and the most complex enemies in terms of animation tech,and smh was able to avoid the ER shader stutters.
My point isnt that its perfect my point is that they push the engine every game the most they can for the game needs while also keeping a fast production cycle(they usually have 4 games in development at the same time,in varying levels of development),if from decides to make game that needs more fidelity they will push the engine in the direction.
Another thing is that From is also conservative in memory,the games at their highest settings at 4k and with RT on uses at most 5,5GB of VRAM way less than contemporany games,the way From chooses to pack and to compress the textures is one of the reasons.
Again my point isnt that its perfect,my point is that they already push the most they can per game.
@@lordanonimmo7699 I understand what you mean now. I do still wish the environments had been bigger in Armored Core 6. But given the time constraints and possible backlash I can understand why they didn't push the system requirements any higher to compensate.
I'd also have to agree on the volumetric/lighting. Just from what I saw in game (especially Elden Ring). Volumetrics are the one setting that's guaranteed to boost the fps if lowered. But say goodbye to a lot of the artistic flair and fidelity.
ER is not stable... Armor Core maybe, but ER was never fixed
I get what you guys mean, but for smaller companies UE5 saves them time. I am slowly getting through Robocop and it looks very good.
Proprietary engines such as the RE engine are bloody amazing truth be told
I know this is Digital Foundry and all, but I think the focus goes way too hard on the technology rather than the game design.
Yes, if a game is made in Unreal, it will use Unreal stuff; but it's like they are not interested in the actual game, just its technology.
John talks about game design alot in his videos.
Tech is what this channel is all about. They sometimes talk about game design but that is not what they usually do and not know for. Go watch other channels for that kind of stuff.
@@x0Fang0xwhat is a game design ?
There are times when watching DF talk about anything, where this scene comes to mind from High Fidelity. And I will just leave it at that...
Louis: You guys are snobs.
Dick: No, we're not.
Louis: Yeah, seriously, you're totally elitist. You feel like the unappreciated scholars, so you shit onto people who know lesser than you.
Rob, Barry, Dick: No!
Louis: Which is everybody...
Rob, Barry, Dick: Yeah...
Louis: That's so sad.
Proprietory engines can be optimized a LOT more especially if the game is a bit more unique. However the art workkflow will never be as good as UE.
Proprietory engines make game look different and thats one of the reasons why they should exist.
Even with the stutter I still think Unreal Engine is the way to go because it can make creators dreams and ideas into reality because the engines are well documented and the team doesn't have to spend resources trying to invent technology to make a scene or graphic possible in most cases. Proprietary engines like what Bethesda uses for instance DO NOT deliver the best graphics. Barely acceptable imo, but those games are amazing for other reasons.
For the longest time unreal engine seemed like the golden standard. It has stutter these days but games still work without being a buggy mess.
I don't know if DF ever covered it but Final Fantasy XV was essentially ruined by their own proprietary engine and was left an unfinished game BECAUSE of internal strife over the continued use of the company's outdated Square/White/Crystal tools engine. Famously I've read developer logs that they just couldn't make the E3 trailer possible like the Leviathan boss fight trailer due to engine limitations so the actual boss fight the game shipped with was radically different and very out of place. Trying to make things work that couldn't took time and money and ruined the final product and their chances of properly finishing the story and game. If they used Unreal which they said they would a few years back for their new games, I think the game would have been in a significantly better place. Even if it had large traversal stutter it would have had significantly more story and probably be more cohesive and probably have the actual Leviathan boss fight from the E3 trailer.
UE5 is a huge improvement for The Talos Principle 2 over Serious Engine, especially when you look at the most recent iterations of Serious Engine. If devs aren't going to implement mesh shader (only one has in 5 years), a decent RT lighting solution, or a distance based level streaming system, then they might as well go with UE5.
Spread the load everyone spread it long and wide
the thing I appreciate about proprietary engines is that they can truly tailor every aspect of the final image to the needs of the project. I love a ton of games that are made in UE4 and 5 to death, but I cannot FUCKING stand the intense movement vector based post processing to resolve every frame. From denoising reflections and lighting and dithered transparency to antialiasing. I cannot fucking stand it. I yearn for at least ONE rasterized "old school" renderer that uses well-worn tricks along SIDE modern innovations and standards to create images with completely different character and clarity. Like Source 2! CS2 and HLA both shy away from temporal based artifact reduction effects, and they both have an unparalleled clarity among pretty much all modern AAA games. Same with Bungie's engine for Destiny. Same with 343's adaptation of Bungie's tech for the modern Halos!
How long will it take until df turns into what IGN is today??
It already started, won't take that long.
We need order 1886 engine out
This i show I felt about UE games in the PS3 era
FFXV is still one of the most beautiful looking games,
Very true, its full of awful open world quests but the game looks visually extremly good
I just wish it had the performance to match that.
No it really isn't. Cyberpunk on a high end PC is off the charts amazing.
I love FF but it is lacking
@@SeloCGN still better quests than rdr2
Is it possible to mod renderware and use it ?. It would be fun
Unreal fatigue in gaming is/will be similar to superhero fatigue in movies. For me the only UE5 game which looks somewhat interesting is Tekken 8 and that's mainly because of it's over the top and flashy character design which helps to mask the blandness of UE5. Yes UE5 is impressive from a technical point of view... but 90% of the time it looks so boring and vanilla. It embodies the term 'content'. I'm 35 so I remember the time when each game looked different. Don't get me wrong, licensed engines were a thing even in the past (Quake engine, UE2, and Renderware) but the art style of these games was often very different.
Definitely for consoles, not sure on the PC side but for the 11 year old PlayStation 4 some of the games naughty dog and insomniac has made for the target hardware is amazing. The PlayStation 4 is nowhere near cutting edge anymore and I'm not sure if it was at launch but TLOU2 looks amazing (litterly just finished it in December) but then again nintendo would be my personal favourite developers, what nintendo puts on time and time again on switch can't help me smile hard. Tears of the kingdom is my favourite game ever within 41 years of gaming. UE games always look the same to me The Re engine is something special though .
Unreal 5 just like previous Unreal Engines...and general life. Mass market things in life being mass efficient and easy to sell products...
Personally, I love the proprietary engines. I love to see the tech and details, what these engines do differently.
Sony's first party generally use their own right?
Yeah almost all Sony studios use a in house engine. I think only Firesprite, Housemarque are confirmed to be using Unreal Engine for their upcoming projects
For me unreal 5 feels very behind. We had horizon zero west and ratched and clank as launch games wich looked great. Now you have jedi survivor with super low textures that sometimes never load in and low performance level.
Jedi Survivor uses UE4
The effort, workforce and budget required in comparison to how much return a proprietary engine gives scales badly considering how little it can be utilized nowadays. Games take longer to create and engines get outdated quicker. To the point that a studio needs to completely revamp an engine every time they make a game unless they're working several games simultaneously with the same one. And considering how people love exclaiming "it's their engine's problem!" every time something goes wrong, it's not worth the hassle. By 2030 it'll be a very rare thing reserved for the biggest studios who can get their money's worth out of it thru 3-4 projects that can be released in a row.
I have a rtx 3060, should I use dlss without frame generation or fsr 3 with frame generation, with regards to image quality
For inage quality you'd always be better off with dlss. Frame gen is great, though. There is a mod that allows DLSS with fsr3 frame gen though for the best of both worlds for Nvidia users. Google dlss to fsr mod.
Frostbite in Dead Space was a huge stuttery mess but I guess it was an outsourced engine.
I’m so over stutter that I thinking taking a break from gaming while PCs r dumb expensive and games r terribly unoptimised messes and unfinished might be the right move.
A lot of stutter I had un that game playing it on ps5, specially when fighting with 3 or 4 monsters in display, immediately started lagging
@@BEPlifestyle On PC going through a door makes it feel like Im about to crash. I’m above the reccomended spec too. Just over it. Even the best PCs like they demonstrated still have it bad (aka a 4090). The only way to get away from it is to not play games from 2023 onwards, on PC lol. I would play on a console for stuff like Jedi survivor (since that’s way better on console) but that’s just way too expensive and would hate to split my library of games in 2 different places.
Nobody asked manbaby
I really don't see every company switching to unreal. For instance, Bethesda is probably going to continue to use the Creation Engine since it does allow them to easily cater to there large modding community in a way that a 3rd party engine would not. And yes, I know they could rebuild all there tools in unreal but they could spend half those resources improving there own engine. Unreal engine is also not well suited to making games which support older hardware. You can get them to work but its going to be more work than an engine that is suited to that older hardware. Lastly, and the biggest reason I don't use unreal, is the workflow sucks. I personally don't need the billion or so features unreal provides so its just overkill for no real benefit.
Why are these guys against the unreal technology? Because of stutters? I'm kind of new to this Please educate me why does stutter even happen
John was literally that guy in the debate class that just had to disagree with whatever was said
Who wants to watch a podcast where everyone agrees with eachother.
Commercial engine addiction. It seems to be terminal
i'd say they deliver the best "flavor"
To answer the question, I'd say no.
It looks good because it's fresh looking compared to Unreal Engine, which looks stale in comparison.
Also, a proprietary game engine has a specific use case that devs can focus on while UE is for everyone, so everything has to be put in and less time is spent on graphics.
Also, has anyone ever took the source code and modified the graphics part? It would make sense since the source code is available.
Unfortunately CD is dropping the REDEngine in favor of Unreal. One game they let get fked up ruined them from using it again.
I understand the sentiment. Unreal is a good engine when used well. But is less appealing to analyze tech wise..
If a game studio should get a new engin it's Fromsoftware
Decima engine > unreal engine 5
He said how UE5 spreads it's load. Too many developers are caught with their pants down.
wait, what?
@@olivur_1459 just quotes by Alex lol
Talos Principle 2 is really incredible looking from a visual and artistic standpoint. I also thought it was the best game of 2023, so that's something to consider.
IMO Croteam could had made The Talos Principle 2 in the Serious engine 4 or newer and I'm pretty sure it would look equally good and play equally well but alas they were probably forced to ditch their inhouse engine and change to UE5, because their main engine developer for reasons, decided to quit and go work on game streaming and VR stuff and like I said in another comment, today is very hard to find good engine engineers.
@@Argoon1981 I'm not sure if Serious Engine 4 supports ray tracing, but your answer is probably the reason for the change.
@@KingSigy No Serious Engine 4 has no raytracing, I would bet money that was not the main reason for leaving the engine behind but who knows, only them. One thing I'm pretty sure the departure of Alen Ladavac (the guy that created the Serious Engine) most add a big influence on their decision.
Would Unreal still be considered Proprietary since it's not open source?
Yes, Unreal Engine is proprietary software
It's not open source, simply public source. The difference matters exactly for the question of if the engine is proprietary, as it means they can effectively charge for the simple use of the engine (you *can* sell open source software, but it's complicated and generally means selling support for the software instead)
The exact differences are a bit fiddly, but IIRC basically you can't show large (>10 lines?) chunks of unreal source code to anyone who hasn't also agreed to the terms, you can make derivative code and distribute binaries built from it without distributing the code (in fact, you must not), and you must pay Epic a fraction of your income. All of these are inconsistent with the open source definition.
Indeed, I don't think the video title is right. Almost all game engines used in big games are proprietary. Godot in one of the few ones I know of that isn't.
@@exscape They should've used Private Game Engines instead of the word Proprietary. Engines like Snowdrop, Frostbite, and RedEngine are company-exclusive and are only distributed within the company while engines like Unity and Unreal Engine are publicly available for anyone's use.
@@exscape despite my answer, context matters; Unreal is proprietary to Epic, not the developers of these games, so asking if games are being developed with proprietary engines is asking if the games are being developed using an engine that the developer owns, not if the engine is proprietary software.
Everytime I read a game it's done with Unreal Engine, makes mi interest in the game decrease. It's not exciting anymore. And a lot of times to me feels like the engine was not developed for the game or not used correctly, I don't really know, but just doesn't fit the game. Having a propietary engine for me it's a lot better because they know what the engine can do and how to tweak and polish everything and was developed for the game in cuestion, it just fits better. So in-house engines for me.
Because many games use the same engine, everything now feels very unified and has no charm of its own, as if I were just playing a different mod :/
Yes
It takes ages to become productive in any engine. Once you know a tool inside out, you don't want to switch and lose time on another arduous learning curve.
Why does James avatar look angry?
Even Nintendo is flirting with Unreal, bespoke engines are dead.
Stay away from Unreal Marketing.