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Why is Unreal Engine 4 taking over Japan?

K

Kleegamefan

K. LEE GAIDEN
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games

Bloodstained:Ritual of the Night
Street Fighter V
Kingdom Hearts III
Dragon Quest XI
Let it Die
Monster Hunter Frontier Online 2
Shenmue 3
Tekken 7

Established franchises. Small kickstarter games. 2D side scrollers. 3D action games. Fighting games. Open world adventures. RPGs.

Other than with driving or flight sims, Japanese developers have really seemed to embrace the UE4 development framework. Does anyone know exactly why this is?

Unreal Engine has enjoyed a large presence in the game development community for years now, but something has changed where even the smallest, independent developers are using UE4. Even giant companies like Square-Enix and Capcom, famous for creating their own tools, have adopted UE4 for some of their biggest titles.

Of course, the latest addition is the biggest Japanese game of all, Dragon Quest! It really cannot be overstated how successful Epic has been in Japan. They have really done a good job there.
 
A

Azure J

Member
Better documentation in their own language + support from Epic Japan + Japan wants what's most optimized to get shit going ASAP + took last gen to heart and want to come back and dominate?
 
R

raven777

Member
CLAWj86VEAE8i7u.jpg:orig


I heard in Nomura's interview that Epic have really good Japanese support for Unreal Engine 4 now...
 
M

Man

Member
Japanese documentation and developer support is seemingly top-notch. Japanese Epic studio, Wiki, forums, everything up and running since day 1.
 
K

Kodiak

Not an asshole.
It's a freely available top tier game engine that outclasses pretty much anything developed internally both in terms of visual fidelity and ease of use.

The blueprint system allows you to easily prototype ideas and build shaders.

It's incredibly artist friendly.

New versions of the engine are constantly getting released and it's easy to upgrade your project to the latest version.

It's higher fidelity than Unity.

It's much snappier and easy to use than CryEngine.
 
R

Resilient

Member
Probably because it costs a shitload to develop in-house engines that quickly become obsolete? UE4 is giving me KH3, so I'm happy.
 
N

Neoxon

Junior Member
Capcom actually has their own next-gen engine, the Panta Rhei, which is supposed to be used in Deep Down. But judging by SFV's use of UE4, the PR engine is likely having issues (which may be why we haven't heard much about Deep Down in a while).

That being said, while the UE4 games look fantastic, the environments in Dragon Quest XI & Kingdom Hearts III do look kinda similar.
 
SerTapTap

SerTapTap

Member
I mean, I don't know why, but thank GOD. Last gen showed the problems of trying to do all your shit inhouse, it just doesn't scale and third party tools have only gotten better not worse as tech complexity increased.
 
T

Teknoman

Member
Kleegamefan said:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games

Bloodstained:Ritual of the Night
Street Fighter V
Kingdom Hearts III
Dragon Quest XI
Let it Die
Monster Hunter Frontier Online 2
Shenmue 3
Tekken 7

Established franchises. Small kickstarter games. 2D side scrollers. 3D action games. Fighting games. Open world adventures. RPGs.

Other than with driving or flight sims, Japanese developers have really seemed to embrace the UE4 development framework. Does anyone know exactly why this is?

Unreal Engine has enjoyed a large presence in the game development community for years now, but something has changed where even the smallest, independent developers are using UE4. Even giant companies like Square-Enix and Capcom, famous for creating their own tools, have adopted UE4 for some of their biggest titles.

Of course, the latest addition is the biggest Japanese game of all, Dragon Quest! It really cannot be overstated how successful Epic has been in Japan. They have really done a good job there.
Click to expand...

Aeana said:
It's easy to use, cheap, and importantly, has very good Japanese documentation.
Click to expand...


I really welcome it too, especially now that we see how diverse games can look with it, vs how you could pretty much tell a game was UE3 from the start. Also as long as it shortens the turn around on well made games or even established series, would be awesome.
 
A

Abriael

Banned
Unreal is seen by many in the industry as the ideal engine to achieve a cartoony look, which obviously adapts very well for anime-ish look.
 
B

Bloodrage

Banned
I'm all for it since it means we're getting more Japanese games in less time. UE4 development is really easy. Can't complain.
 
A

Aeana

Member
HK-47 said:
They have a bunch of international offices. Its sound business for a middleware engine developer.
Click to expand...

While true, it's something they did not have for UE3 to begin with. Which is why the Japanese games that did use UE3 earlier on last generation produced such poor results.
 
N

Neoxon

Junior Member
Sir TapTap said:
I mean, I don't know why, but thank GOD. Last gen showed the problems of trying to do all your shit inhouse, it just doesn't scale and third party tools have only gotten better not worse as tech complexity increased.
Click to expand...
Have you seen the MT Framework games that Capcom put out? They look great even today, & the MT Framework games that are on PC all run like a dream. I was hoping that the Panta Rhei would be a proper successor. But now that we haven't heard much of it in a while, I'm concerned that may not be the case.
 
H

HK-47

Oh, bitch bitch bitch.
Neoxon said:
Capcom actually has their own next-gen engine, the Panta Rhei, which is supposed to be used in Deep Down. But judging by SFV's use of UE4, the PR engine is likely having issues (which may be why we haven't heard much about Deep Down in a while).

That being said, while the UE4 games look fantastic, the environments in Dragon Quest XI & Kingdom Hearts III do look kinda similar.
Click to expand...

A shame because Panta Rhei's predecessor, MT Framework, was solid as hell.
 
P

PeakPointMatrix

Member
Because Japanese developers creating their own engines from scratch for every game is an ancient, expensive, time consuming archaic process that has no place in today's development world, and many of last gen's biggest Japanese developers payed dearly for it, Square being the biggest example.
 
I

Inuhanyou

Believes Dragon Quest is a franchise managed by Sony
Japanese devs arent as proud as last gen, they are on the backfoot so to speak, so they are more humble about accepting middleware solutions than they were beforehand.

It helps that UE4 is very prominent, easy to use and gets good results in general.
 
H

Hsieh

Member
Last generation, Square Enix tried writing their own HD engine and it was a disaster. Square Enix's HD all ended up taking considerably more time and resource to develop than they had originally anticipated and the end result was that the number of games Square was able to release dramatically fell during the PS2 to PS3 generation transition.

Final Fantasy XIII took forever to develop and to cut down development time, they had to release two sequels to FF13 to recycle assets. The mainline Kingdom Hearts game sat out the entire generation due to Square not enough development resources. Final Fantasy XV was announced in 2006 and still isn't out yet nine years later. All of these problems are due to the development hell caused by Square making their own engine.

If you look at Square's upcoming schedule for PS4, they have a lot more games in development. The improvement in Square's productivity is because they stopped trying to make their own engine and are using Unreal Engine instead.
 
V

VariantX

Member
Its stupid easy to use, and it allows devs to have access to a powerful and robust engine that likely already will do everything they want out of the box that will be supported and updated further at no extra cost. That's money not spent building a custom engine specific to a few games and training people how to use its features.
 
Z

ZhugeEX

Banned
You only need to look at how Luminous engine or PantaRhei turned out to realise that game engine development is
1. Costly
2. Taking a bloody long time

Unreal Engine 4 takes away those two factors and allows game creators to start development of a game instantly (once planning is complete) and it allows for completion of each stage of development in a much quicker and cost efficient way.

Epic basically have a platform that allows Japanese developers to create games at the same/better quality than before but without the frustrations or time or cost of developing their own game engine first.

Look at how development time is much shorter with Unreal 4 compared to a propitiatory in house engine *Cough* FF13/15 *Cough*. Also Epic stepped it up on support to all customers of theirs.
 
C

CrAzY FiNgErS

Member
Hopefully we see more Japanese studios jump on the U4 bandwagon. Kudos to Epic for having enough business sense to have everything in place to make this happen.

I am all for custom engines and competition in the engine market, but I haven't seen any other engine maker step up like Epic has.
 
D

DannyDanger

Member
I'm glad its happening

I remember cringing whenever i heard anything on PS3 was using UE3

Also UE4 is so versatile, i was thinking we should nickname it Kawhi Leonard
 
R

Ravidrath

Member
Because Japan failed to invest in tech and tools the last two generations, and is very far behind on the tech side. This is just them finally acknowledging that there making their own engines at this point is a waste of time and money, AND would result in a technically inferior engine / toolset.

And games are too big now to brute-force with people power.

This is a good thing.
 
H

HomerSimpson-Man

Member
Ain't no one got the time and money to just waste making all these engines from scratch, when a perfectly well documented working engine with good performance and accommodating to various art style exists. It lets devs dive into the game creation part and not fret over the game engine creation.

Last generation was a painful time for change over for these many devs, and UE4 saves a lot of time, money, and headache.
 
K

Kleegamefan

K. LEE GAIDEN
Kodiak said:
It's a freely available top tier game engine that outclasses pretty much anything developed internally both in terms of visual fidelity and ease of use.

The blueprint system allows you to easily prototype ideas and build shaders.

It's incredibly artist friendly.

New versions of the engine are constantly getting released and it's easy to upgrade your project to the latest version.

It's higher fidelity than Unity.

It's much snappier and easy to use than CryEngine.
Click to expand...

Yeah, so after Crytek has been yapping for years how superior CryEngine is, you would think they would see much better adoption than they have. I get that the big boys are more comfortable partnering with Epic, but the fact CryEngine is losing mindshare to UE4 with the small devs/kickstarters is really surprising.

One of the few areas Epic had any weaknesses last gen was with Japanese adoption of Unreal Engine. Seems like this was a lost opportunity for Crytek.
 
B

BocoDragon

or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Realize This Assgrab is Delicious
I love how the archetypical UE3 game was thought of as "ugly bald space marine with drab brown colors and texture pop-in"

And now with UE4 its more like "bright! shiny! blues and greens! anime styled people with flowing hair!"

I know the engine actually has little to do with that. I'm just stating perception.
 
C

chrisPjelly

Member
It's unreal how the engine's reputation has changed. It's only a couple of years ago that people were complaining about UE3's plasticy look across most titles that use it. It's great seeing more diversity in UE4's capabilities.
 
S

Son Of D

Member
Neoxon said:
Have you seen the MT Framework games that Capcom put out? They look great even today, & the MT Framework games that are on PC all run like a dream. I was hoping that the Panta Rhei would be a proper successor. But now that we haven't heard much of it in a while, I'm concerned that may not be the case.
Click to expand...

Seeing that Capcom are using UE4 for SFV makes me think that Panta Rhei is done. I won't be surprised if Devil May Cry 5 (should it be announced) uses UE4. Which will show how better UE4 is from 3 after how DmC had issues on PS3/360.
 
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