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[Otakumegane]

From Crystal Tools, which was so expensive that SE needed to squeeze 3 FFXIII games from it, followed up by the second disaster of Luminous, in which the only game to use it is FFXV. Kingdom Hearts 3, originally thought to be utilizing this engine, was then moved to UE4.

The Panta Rhei Engine which many people remember as the engine that came announced for Deep Down, a game that has yet to shown itself and a shamble compared to Capcom's previous MT Framework.

The Fox Engine, famous for having been built by Kojima's team, and used in developing MGSV. While the engine itself was called great and perhaps the only engine from a high profile Japanese developer that wasn't mired in development problems and was successful in launching its flagship game, Konami's apparent exit from the console market means this engine will again be left under utilized.

It just seems that Japanese 3rd parties can't get their engines right this time around.

 

[Neoleo2143]

Why did Capcom stop using MT Framework?

 

[BluePikmin11]

To be honest, I thought Japan would be advanced enough to understand video game engines by now.

 

[netgrimoire]

Maybe it's cheaper to use third party engines than to use/maintain/advance your own (?)

But maybe not, third party engines have licensing costs iirc.

 

[MegaManTrigger]

I imagine R&D cost plays a role, especially if the company isn't interested in funnelling in more money after seeing bottom lines.

 

[Phediuk]

Too expensive to create proprietary engines nowadays. Japan was very late in adopting middleware.

 

[Dio]

Maybe it's cheaper to use third party engines than to use/maintain/advance your own (?)

But maybe not, third party engines have licensing costs iirc.

Well, UE4 has been a godsend this generation. Epic decided to really step up their Japanese support and now they have a way more dedicated and indepth support system in Japan compared to UE3. You know, access to documentation in Japanese and all that.

There's no point wasting huge amounts of money on making new in-house engines when you can barely afford it these days, with technology advancing at a breakneck pace.

Not only that, UE4 is totally and completely free below a certain revenue point, meaning that small developers and doujin circles can use it however they wish - and the only thing is that above that revenue line, they get a cut of profits, but IMO with how much of a black hole it is to invest in engines UE4 has essentially swooped in and saved people a shitload of effort in the JP industry. I get the feeling KH3 wouldn't even exist if not for UE4.

 

[bobbytkc]

It is simple. Japanese developers are earning less over time due to a shrinking domestic market. No money = lack of resources to create proprietary engines. The money makers in japan are increasingly mobile games that do not need such engines.

 

[CHC]

- Growth of the mobile market in Japan and thus less opportunity to use in-house engines across multiple titles.

- The stubborn / insular culture of most Japanese developers, preventing outside collaboration or the use of middleware like physics and foliage code. It's getting more and more complex to make an entire game engine, most places don't just develop some entire engine in secret anymore. Not feasible with what is expected of such a toolset now.

 

[sprsk]

It is simple. Japanese developers are earning less over time due to a shrinking domestic market. No money = lack of resources to create proprietary engines. The money makers in japan are increasingly mobile games that do not need such engines.

Yeah this is definitely part of it, but also creating engines from scratch is something Japanese companies have been doing forever, the reason they keep doing it is ego. There's no money in making a proprietary engine, especially when they cost so much to make vs off the shelf stuff. They waste all their money building something that would only be used on a couple games, with results that aren't that better than what is currently available via Unreal 4, in a market where selling AAA experiences is getting tougher and tougher.

 

[Alo81]

The Fox Engine, famous for having been built by Kojima's team, and used in developing MGSV. While the engine itself was called great and perhaps the only engine from a high profile Japanese developer that wasn't mired in development problems and was successful in launching its flagship game, Konami's apparent exit from the console market means this engine will again be left under utilized.

This isn't a failing of the developers or the engine, its a failing of the publisher.

Fox Engine is a technical marvel as far as engines go. It looks gorgeous, it runs beautifully, and the one game showcased on it plays like a dream.

If anything, Fox Engine stands antithetical to the entire purpose of this thread.

 

[Inuhanyou]

MT framework and Fox engine were good. And Silicon engine is great you know? Among many other engines in use. So i think your overstating the situation.

Also, your kind of wrong OP. Its not the fact that japanese engines are bad, they make engines all the time for games, the problem is that the largest companies pushed for scalable and highly adaptive engines like UE3 and uE4, which is kind of impossible and out of the league of people not versed in scalable engine technology.

If your just making a game, an engine is no problem fit for that specific game. But if your making an engine that needs to run all sorts of games the company can think of, that's a bigger issue and far easier to fail at.

They have to make games in some way, and so trying to make a scalable engine that will fit every situation, when each company has their own specific needs and wants out of the games, will run into problems and issues.

SE failed with Crystal tools because their entire focus was on pretty but limited interactivity, which essentially killed the engine when put under higher load situations(aka FF13-2 which never had a stable 30fps on console) It was not built for real time cut scene rendering, wider world development or anything else besides what FF13 was intended to be, on top of the dev of the engine costing way more than they expected it to.

It was the same with Luminous which, while a lot more tailored to open worlds, has taken over 5 years to get running, has cost the company a lot more than they expected, and is still limited in what kind of tools it can use outside of FF15's direct needs

 

[CHC]

This isn't a failing of the developers or the engine, its a failing of the publisher.

Fox Engine is a technical marvel as far as engines go. It looks gorgeous, it runs beautifully, and the one game showcased on it plays like a dream.

If anything, Fox Engine stands antithetical to the entire purpose of this thread.

Eh I mean the engine itself is good yes, but there are two other considerations:

a) How much more could they have added to the game itself if they HADN'T built an engine from scratch? Did they expressly NEED Fox Engine to achieve MGSV or did they make it out of a sense of pride, or an unwillingness to retrain staff with a new toolset? MGSV is frankly very truncated and unfinished feeling, using an existing engine would have saved huge amounts of money and time. Nowadays there are such a range of engines to choose from I find it hard to believe that there wasn't one that could have worked.

b) There's a lot of other considerations for what makes a "good" engine than just the experience for the player. Who knows if Fox Engine would even be usable to anyone outside Konima's team, and who knows how flexible and fast it was to work with during the development of MGSV.

(Though I'm not disagreeing that it is technically impressive, nor am I denying that Konami screwed the pooch in a lot of ways as well.)

 

[nynt9]

As a person who does professional software development, I'd wager that the development community over there is quite different. We have a lot of code and knowledge sharing online from all across the world, but it's all in English. These resources aren't as accessible to non English speaking countries. Additionally, the corporate culture of software development is very aggressive and fast moving in the west, whereas Japanese companies are notoriously inert and conservative.

I think it boils down mostly to development attitudes and resources.

 

[Reallink]

Well, UE4 has been a godsend this generation. Epic decided to really step up their Japanese support and now they have a way more dedicated and indepth support system in Japan compared to UE3. You know, access to documentation in Japanese and all that.

There's no point wasting huge amounts of money on making new in-house engines when you can barely afford it these days, with technology advancing at a breakneck pace.

Not only that, UE4 is totally and completely free below a certain revenue point, meaning that small developers and doujin circles can use it however they wish - and the only thing is that above that revenue line, they get a cut of profits, but IMO with how much of a black hole it is to invest in engines UE4 has essentially swooped in and saved people a shitload of effort in the JP industry. I get the feeling KH3 wouldn't even exist if not for UE4.

I'm pretty sure not a single AAA (or even AA) UE4 game has shipped yet, 3 years into the generation. If that's a godsend, I'd hate to see the alternative.

 

[Renekton]

Fox Engine is a technical marvel as far as engines go. It looks gorgeous, it runs beautifully, and the one game showcased on it plays like a dream.

If anything, Fox Engine stands antithetical to the entire purpose of this thread.

Well MGS5 comes with sparse terrain, low-poly models and flat blocky structures.

 

[M3d10n]

In-house engines are going the way of dodo everywhere, Japanese devs are just catching up.

It's simply not cost effective for most devs to build and maintain an engine when the bar keeps getting higher and higher every generation. To make it worse, Japanese development culture had very little technology and knowledge sharing between devs, compared to western culture, leading to tons of wheel reinventing.

I'm pretty sure not a single AAA (or even AA) UE4 game has shipped yet, 3 years into the generation. If that's a godsend, I'd hate to see the alternative.

Damn, I know SFV had problems, but not even AA? Brutal.

UE4 launched in 2014. How many AAA and Aa games that started being developed in 2014 shipped again?

 

[Sesha]

They simply can't keep up. Basically only the biggest publishers are able to develop and maintain cutting edge graphics engines anymore.

Why did Capcom stop using MT Framework?

They didn't. They're still using it for smaller games. Panta Rhei was only intended as their console AAA engine.

I'm pretty sure not a single AAA (or even AA) UE4 game has shipped yet, 3 years into the generation. If that's a godsend, I'd hate to see the alternative.

Street Fighter V and Tekken 7 are both out and about. Not that your counterargument argument makes any sense. UE4 can't be blamed for the lack of games being shipped. And the alternatives include Luminous, Panta Rhei and the Fox Engine. One hasn't had any shipped games yet, one is MIA, and the last one has two-three games out made with it.

 

[Terrell]

Poor utilization is ultimately what kills them. So many of them have been purely conceptual and/or designed with minimal flexibility. MT Framework seemed to be the exception.

Japanese engines might actually be a good thing, but not using the method they have been, which is building them around specific games.

I think the first Japanese company that makes an engine that they're willing to license and build with other games and developers in mind may be able to have something that would financially sustain them long term. But that has never been the business model for their engine building thus far.

Heck, even Sony and Nintendo have an opportunity here, if they built engines that worked with other hardware than just their own. Maybe that's part of the NX strategy for Nintendo, for all we know.

 

[copelandmaster]

I'm pretty sure not a single AAA (or even AA) UE4 game has shipped yet, 3 years into the generation. If that's a godsend, I'd hate to see the alternative.

If you're just looking at AAA, Tekken 7 came out last spring, SFV came out a few months ago.

Lower than that, plenty of games have shipped. A handful in 2014, and a huge amount more in 2015 and 2016.

Both tiers will be getting a deluge of games in the remainder of this year and 2017.

Poor utilization is ultimately what kills them. So many of them have been purely conceptual and/or designed with minimal flexibility. MT Framework seemed to be the exception.

Japanese engines might actually be a good thing, but not using the method they have been, which is building them around specific games.

I think the first Japanese company that makes an engine that they're willing to license and build with other games and developers in mind may be able to have something that would financially sustain them long term. But that has never been the business model for their engine building thus far.

Heck, even Sony and Nintendo have an opportunity here, if they built engines that worked with other hardware than just their own. Maybe that's part of the NX strategy for Nintendo, for all we know.

Silicon Studio makes several game engines for mobile and arcade titles, mainly Published by Bandai Namco and Square Enix.

 

[E_Darkness]

Well MGS5 comes with sparse terrain, low-poly models and flat blocky structures.

I think that's mainly because it had to run on PS3/360 hardware.

 

[Javin98]

I'm really interested to see what the RE engine is capable of and how it will end up. The RE7 demo looks great, especially the material shaders and lighting.

 

[Sesha]

I'm really interested to see what the RE engine is capable of and how it will end up. The RE7 demo looks great, especially the material shaders and lighting.

Supposedly textures look like shit in VR mode. Considering the engine is VR-focused, that's not a good sign.

 

[Zaptruder]

UE4 and Unity happened, making the economics of developing proprietary in house engines rather less appealing.

Plus with a standardization of engine development across those two platforms, you get the nice benefit of a more fungible talent pool - you don't have to train people to learn your engine specifically, just find someone from the growing talent pool of UE4/Unity users.

Plus modern game engines are huge huge beasts. Some of the most complex software platforms in the world.

 

[Illucio]

It's too expensive for a company to create a workable game engine. They are too focused on their own games then they are with making the engine easy to use and understand. Unreal Engine is taught in schools as well, so it has a one up to most developers in that respect.

If for example Square wanted Luminous to be more successful they should allow the software to be free for fair use, try and get colleges worldwide to teach using it, and make it more user friendly, constantly updating it, and providing free content to help boost a consumer base. Then anyone wanting to publish a for profit game must pay for a license or make an agreement with Square in order to publish it.

I still think Luminous Engine has way better realistic graphical approach then Unreal Engine 4, but Unreal Engine 4 makes better cel shaded/more cartoony approach to it's games, which is why I'm happy Kingdom Hearts 3 is using it's engine.

edit: It's too much work to sell a game engine, a game company would need a constant group working on it and maybe be it's own company in order to make it successful. The way game companies just haven't dedicated much work into these engines to make them hit off whatsoever :/

 

[Javin98]

Supposedly textures look like shit in VR mode. Considering the engine is VR-focused, that's not a good sign.

Hmm, at the very least, textures look good in normal mode. We'll see, I guess, but for now, looks promising.

 

[Sesha]

Hmm, at the very least, textures look good in normal mode. We'll see, I guess, but for now, looks promising.

I'm mostly curious about what the future of the engine will be. Will it only be used for first person RE games, or all of them, I wonder.

Then there's the matter of DMC5. All of their other active franchises have seen at least one new release or announcement this generation, and most of them on different engines. So I wonder if it will use an up and running Panta Rhei, UE4, or its own dedicated engine.

 

[RedSwirl]

How many Japanese publishers are still able to do things on a true AAA scale anymore? The only western companies still doing their own highly advanced engines are the big guys like EA, Ubisoft, Activision, and Take Two. The only outlier I can think of at the moment is CDProjekt with REDkit. Some indies can still do their own engines but they're obviously not the same as Frostbite or Ubisoft's half-dozen forks.

The main Japanese publishers probably don't have the capitol to risk on that. FFXV is probably going to be the last Luminous game. There aren't even that many other Japanese third party games on the horizon with that scale of production budget. The ones on the way are mostly using Unreal.

Well MGS5 comes with sparse terrain, low-poly models and flat blocky structures.

People forget that MGSV at its technological core is still a last-gen game.

 

[NCR Redslayer]

I feel like we had this thread before but Konami does not make games for the FOX engine because their Konami now. Unless PES still gets made.

 

[dragonbane]

How many Japanese publishers are still able to do things on a true AAA scale anymore? The only western companies still doing their own highly advanced engines are the big guys like EA, Ubisoft, Activision, and Take Two. The only outlier I can think of at the moment is CDProjekt with REDkit. Some indies can still do their own engines but they're obviously not the same as Frostbite or Ubisoft's half-dozen forks..

Almost every Sony developer has used its own engine (Guerilla, ND, SSM, Sucker Punch, Quantic Dream, MM, RaD, probably Bend). They share some libraries with each other, but that's about it. The Guerilla engine has displayed some flexibility being used for Until Dawn as well. I assume ND's engine is highly complex too. The others make sense since they focus on either open world or very niche/unique genres Unreal Engine might not be very suitable for.

Of course only having to work on one platform and usually only for one specific type of game makes things significantly easier. Still, these studios employ some big R&D groups. For example Quantic Dream has a team of about 30 full time programmers solely dedicated to working on the engine/toolchain while the actual game code is handled by another team.

 

[Terrell]

Silicon Studio makes several game engines for mobile and arcade titles, mainly Published by Bandai Namco and Square Enix.

And they're probably doing pretty good for themselves, despite that their big draw is post-processing effects that can be integrated into other engines, with their only full-scope game development engine being Orochi, which is only just starting to gain traction and suffers from very low amounts of publicity. Same with Mizuchi, their rendering engine, which I hear is actually pretty fantastic in theory according to a graphic design friend of mine that I asked about it.

 

[Aters]

Why don't you just ask: why there are so few high profile Japanese games? If the majority of the industry is still making PS3 or even PS2 level games, there really isn't any need for a new engine.

 

[Alo81]

Well MGS5 comes with sparse terrain, low-poly models and flat blocky structures.

In practice the game looks gorgeous. That stuff only means so much when the game is constantly looking great.

And if we're talking about the engine in general, Ground Zeroes showed that the engine is capable of very dense areas that look awesome.

 

[Imperfected]

Almost every Sony developer has used its own engine (Guerilla, ND, SSM, Sucker Punch, Quantic Dream, MM, RaD, probably Bend). They share some libraries with each other, but that's about it. The Guerilla engine has displayed some flexibility being used for Until Dawn as well. I assume ND's engine is highly complex too. The others make sense since they focus on either open world or very niche/unique genres Unreal Engine might not be very suitable for.

Of course only having to work on one platform and usually only for one specific type of game makes things significantly easier. Still, these studios employ some big R&D groups. For example Quantic Dream has a team of about 30 full time programmers solely dedicated to working on the engine/toolchain while the actual game code is handled by another team.

Sony first-party projects can appeal to Sony's engineers for assistance with their engines, though, can't they? And even then, these games will often use a decent amount of middleware rather than a completely custom engine (Havok physics, for instance).

A similar Japanese instance would be From Software, who had Sony help for the Demon's/Dark engine (and used Havok), but then experienced obviously problems building their own engine for Dark Souls 2 (and moving away from Havok).