This is exactly what I'm talking about. While ARK is a great concept and a fun romp...my goodness, it's a mess of wonky mechanics, very unintuitive systems, and strange gameplay behavior in several areas. And, look at what's happened to the graphics. They're not "bad" by any means, but they have clearly been scaled way back. The reason for this -- clearly not lack of vision! More than likely, it's because the Unreal Engine simply couldn't handle all that additional code and still provide top-notch graphics...which is what Unreal is primarily built for.This is also a great example that using Unreal Engine doesn't mean a "bug free" game and a well optimized game...
ARK still a "very buggy" game even after years of regular patches/updates and still run horribly on consoles. Way worse than Cyberpunk at release, that's for sure (if you have played ARK on XB1, even XB1x which was the best console possible at its release, you would know it^^)
Again, I never said it was. This is not the topic. CP2077 was wildly ambitious, and clearly the studio bit off too much for the time and resources they had. That has nothing to do with the fact that the REDengine is specifically built for exactly the type of RPG mechanics that The Witcher and Cyberpunk provide. Unreal Engine is directly not.Even if I like CP2077 , the present iteration of REDengine doesn't look like a great example of robust,smooth,trouble free development cycle. And if you need to rely on crunch due to engine issues, i would say you have a problem.
This is an utterly ridiculous argument. CDPR has now released 3 massive, successful titles on REDengine: TW2, TW3, and CP2077. All of that R&D has been paid back in spades. The engine is gorgeous, and it's one of the most robust I've ever seen. It's not the most user-friendly in terms of modding, but it does what it does at a platinum standard. Yes, mistakes are still possible. Yes, the implementation of some of the mechanics could be improved. But no -- in terms of functionality, visual to gameplay balance, and in-game, real-time cinematics at the level of detail involved, Unreal Engine doesn't hold a candle to what REDengine can do.You might be able to point me "gameplay features" that were only possible in REDengine and not visuals/cinematics, but if I have to guess they switched to 3rd party engine because they cannot(or they dont want to) afford a big enough engine team able to realease a stable engine with all the (mostly visual) technical advances ahead of game development.
RED engine is not free, it costs them a significant amount of money to develop/upgrade/maintain and it might be they reached a point of diminishing returns.
Is the same reason semiconductor industry moved to mostly fabless model,r&d and operating expenses were increasing each year so it made sense to outsource manufacturing to TSMC/others and focus only on design...
What Unreal does offer is, in my opinion, at least, much more optimized rendering, higher FPS, with superior graphical fidelity, overall. By licensing the Unreal Engine, that's an expenditure that will be an expenditure no matter what. Why in the name of The Great Pumpkin would I take the engine I just spent 15 years to get working at this astounding level...then try to re-create the exact same functionality in an engine that's specifically not built to do those things? And pay another studio for it, to boot??? That's starting over with code I'm not even familiar with to create a product that would be a compromise at best.
This doesn't make any sense at all. The only thing that would make sense is that: the project is not a complex RPG. It will be better served by an action-based engine, and Unreal can help maximize the visuals.
As stated above. CDPR built their own engine from scratch. Why would they try to hamfist the same functionality into someone else's engine? Why would they start over again? That would be utterly counterproductive. That would be inefficient to an extreme.You know that you can interface your own modules right? , that example from marketplace is made by an individual who makes some money selling modules to small teams/individuals.
I've fiddled with it. Watched a buddy play quite a chunk. It's Gamebryo recreated in Unreal. Modular, limited, but the graphics are cool. Gameplay is fun enough, but very tired. Been there, done that, with countless Bethesda titles and spinoffs. Outer Worlds is not doing anything new -- it's simply handling it better than Bethesda does, arguably. I did like the characters a lot better, but I could have accomplished that with a text-based adventure.If you have the chance,fire up the Outer Worlds is completely opposite example of what you claim.
Graphics are worse than TW3/CP2077, combat and movement is more clunky and less fluid than CP2077 but in terms of quest design-with that i meant the actual quest,not the dialogs/writing/cinematics-,rpg elements(attributes/skills/perks/flaws and they are used during gameplay) is "deeper" than both TW3/CP2077 (whather is better game than any of them, i will call a tie with CP2077/TW3).
Engine-wise, Outer Worlds is a system written in the 1990s with better graphics. You can't list a single thing that Outer Worlds does that Morrowind couldn't do when it was released. Its just looks better.
It's definitely a selling point -- absolutely! And I'll say again: I'd call Unreal the best graphics that any engine can create in the modern world. When you are looking at a game written in Unreal and taking full advantage of it, any other game is going to be hard pressed to even compete. But in order to take full advantage, it can't be doing too much other stuff in the background.i think finding people that are already familiar too UE is a big factor too. Selfmade engine has selfmade stuff and req much more time too learn then UE is also my guess. Heck i can probably learn it myself trough videos and so on right now. The tool is free too so you can actually learn it before you start working at CDPR. With the whole restructuring and agile way too work im also guessing this is a big factor. perhaps it has a much smoother workflow and so on(im not a gameprogrammer so im just guessing here). I do have some experiance with workflows and fast/just in time production tho ^^
Probably your reasons are a big factor too sadly, kinda wish they went the other way in terms of RPG elements but we shall see. Perhaps this is a reason for partnership too, too make more UE modules with RPG games in mind.
Hence, while REDengine is certainly capable of competing -- it's not built for liquid-smooth, real-time rendering and lighting. It's built for incorporating layer upon layer of mechanics that can be constantly updated in real-time to create extremely deep, cinematic moments and a wide range of different functionalities. If I don't need any of that for my title...why would I want to deal with it? I'd have to manage it whether I'm using those features or not.
So, what you're saying about workflow is likely right on the money: Don't need all the RPG mechanics for this game. Unreal would work better. Let's get those guys to partner up with us! Shortest distance between two points for this project.