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[64bitmodels]

Very few people gave a shit about playing games from 1981 in 2001, whereas today it's quite possible those old games are more popular than they were back then.

Maybe because those 1981 systems were harder to get your hands on and emulate thanks to the difficulty of tracking down a console or getting a decent enough PC to run them? PCs were far harder to build then. Less people were also interested in playing 80s games in the 2000s because.... there were less people playing video games, back then.

You're able to reminisce about the 'good old days' today because of the advancements in technology and the ability to emulate old games and play remasters of them on any console you want. don't forget that

 

[diffusionx]

Maybe because those 1981 systems were harder to get your hands on and emulate thanks to the difficulty of tracking down a console or getting a decent enough PC to run them? PCs were far harder to build then. Less people were also interested in playing 80s games in the 2000s because.... there were less people playing video games, back then.

You're able to reminisce about the 'good old days' today because of the advancements in technology and the ability to emulate old games and play remasters of them on any console you want. don't forget that

The fact that, I don't know, Dead Space, can come out today and still feel extremely fresh and new is a damning indictment of how the industry has been putting out games for a long time, and the fact that you can indeed play those games does not change that. Nobody in 2001 was saying "wow, Yar's Revenge!" except as a novelty maybe, whereas Metroid Prime just came out and people are like "holy shit this plays better than virtually anything else out there still."

Sometimes the "good old days" really were that. If the industry was still putting out games as good as it used to, nobody would be demanding constant remasters/remakes of anything.

 

[SlimySnake]

of course. To what degree they can manipulate it, I have no idea.
remember when like 75% of Unreal Engine games had the same "running, low fov, crouching" spring as in gears of war? I bet they just used what was in UE sdk and "ran" with it.
It's not like that anymore of course. But I still like to see different results

I think days gone showed that first party studios can do whatever they want with a third party engine. That horde mechanic is the best in any zombie game out there. even Sony's own TLOU2 didnt have anything quite like it.

They also managed to do a fully dynamic weather system that changed the texture of each area in minutes covering the ground in mud or thick snow. It was brilliant.

This video from Epic shows 40 different areas and they all have a varied look to them.

 

[SmokedMeat]

The chips were special and maybe worse than x86 chips... ok.
But because they were special, a special tools had to be developed and great focus given to make games... so the results were special too.

PC/tech companies were still involved in making those “special” chips. All this talk of magic makes me wonder if some people really think console makers were making their own hardware?
I get what you’re saying about engines, although that wasn’t always for the best. I still remember those early Saturn days.

 

[bender]

 

[TGO]

It's been like this for a decade......

 

[begotten]

I've seen a studios' curated version of Unreal Engine and it looked like something that should be runinng on MS 2000 because of how modified it was with their own existing plugins and technology.

It requires some shallow thinking to assume all developers are working with the same engine and are all going to make the same thing because they use UE.

 

[fran.fernandez]

Thanks god no more unity

 

[Majormaxxx]

Consoles and their magical chips lmfao. Do you think Blast Processing was real?

It actually was real but not in that way

 

[Knightime_X]

"Magical chips" were the same but not the same as intel or amd.
The reason it's no longer used because you can't just make a chip that's magically better than what we currently have.
Spending billions on R&D to make a chip that's on par with something already available, and cheaper is pointless.

Engine wise, UE5 isn't bad at all. It all boils down to how well its used.
At least you know it was a bad game with a good engine, unlike the old days were we had great games on shit engines or worse, shit games on shit engines.
Great games on great engines happened but rare.

 

[Moses85]

Exactly.

Who cares.

I mean look at KH4, it looks good and is UE5. Makes no freaking difference, IF you have skilled devs. If you don't, it will be exactly as it was before.

KH4 stands for?

 

[JackMcGunns]

OMG, so sad when all games use the most advanced 3D game engine in existence!!

 

[Raven77]

Different engines give games different looks and feels. I completely agree with OP here.

If everything is running on the same type of hardware and using the same engine, naturally most of the games are going to look about the same with the way they use lighting, materials, etc.

 

[nkarafo]

Custom hardware only mattered in the arcades. Because it was stupidly powerful and beyond the consumer's reach. Something like the Model 3 in 1996 would destroy even the most expensive PC money could buy, including near future upgrades like the VooDoo card.

When arcades stopped using expensive custom hardware and focused on consumer stuff (console equivalent boards, PC hardware, etc) nobody cared anymore since there was no reason to leaver their homes to play the next state-of-the-art videogame.

 

[cyberheater]

but several quest games use the unreal engine

moss
pavlov
contractors
zero caliber
tetris effect
saints & sinners

probably more

It's good that there are some. Love the dog gif by the way.

 

[ChiefDada]

I'm quite surprised by the amount of negative responses towards OP. Many developers have been singing the same tune lately.

Might want to relax with the terrible threads bruv

In the context of NeoGAF, this is far from a terrible thread. On the contrary, it is a very interesting topic with the potential for great discussion.

 

[vpance]

Imagine not wanting UE5, the only thing that will give us actual next gen games

 

[StereoVsn]

Can we just stop with the stutter in PC titles with 5.1? Please, for God's sake, please stop .

 

[Kaleinc]

But it means boiz with $10k pcs will also have to endure unreal stutter just like switch plebs.

 

[ChiefDada]

I think days gone showed that first party studios can do whatever they want with a third party engine. That horde mechanic is the best in any zombie game out there. even Sony's own TLOU2 didnt have anything quite like it.

 

[kiphalfton]

KH4 stands for?

Kingdom Hearts 4

 

[UltimaKilo]

I'm quite surprised by the amount of negative responses towards OP. Many developers have been singing the same tune lately.





In the context of NeoGAF, this is far from a terrible thread. On the contrary, it is a very interesting topic with the potential for great discussion.

Agreed.

 

[Shubh_C63]

I say creativity will take a hit when Devs are supposed to make games based on engines capability rather than making their own per their vision BUT this also means less buggy mess of a game if 90% of developers starts using the same engine which by law of averages will make devs better at making the game.

I don't mind. UE must be versatile enough to cater broad ideas and more expertise and help to go around the industry where everything seems bug ridden fest.

 

[Crayon]

Yeah those were fun days. They're over.

Be grateful you were there to see it in the first place. Like arcades. Or smoking flights.

 

[sinnergy]

And? Also : Have you worked with UE5.1 ? I have , it’s amazing . Creativity will grow exponentially because of it, now you can work on gameplay / story, instead of building a whole engine ..

 

[buenoblue]

I mean film is film. Music is all made the same way. If the tools are standard creativity is the differentiator. We need more creativity and better writing more than new technology.

 

[JackMcGunns]

At the end of hte day it's just a tool. You can get a game that looks like HiFi Rush or Hellblade 2, in other words, the results are up to the creator. Complaining about what tool they use to get to their vision or assuming that it's somehow bad for the industry is silly imo.

 

[Fbh]

I think days gone showed that first party studios can do whatever they want with a third party engine. That horde mechanic is the best in any zombie game out there. even Sony's own TLOU2 didnt have anything quite like it.

They also managed to do a fully dynamic weather system that changed the texture of each area in minutes covering the ground in mud or thick snow. It was brilliant.

This video from Epic shows 40 different areas and they all have a varied look to them.

And that's not even counting the more stylized looks which the engine is great at pulling off

 

[Ainem Enamas]

Limits of the hardware is in the optimization of hardware.

 

[PSYGN]

The barrier to entry is so high now (cost, technology) that it makes no business sense to create your own engine today unless you’re a hobbyist (indie). The ones that have their own engine have either been in the gaming business for long or have transitioned to an engine.

 

[dcx4610]

Consoles lose a bit of their magic by no longer being different and unique but that's the only downside. The upside is that you will get backwards compatibility going forward, hardware is powerful and there is parity between platforms. Unless you have top of the line PC hardware, there is a pretty consistent experience between PC/Xbox/Sony platforms. It's all about which hardware you prefer mostly. You'd be hard pressed to tell a difference between 3 running at the same time outside of resolution and frame rate and even then, it's close.

To me, that's a very good thing. I no longer feeling like I'm having to make huge concessions when I play on console. It holds up very well to PC. I still prefer and probably always will prefer PC but I'm happy for console gamers that they are getting high quality experiences now.

 

[SNG32]

There is a positive side as well: Everyone will specialize in commercial engines and they'll be very proficient.

Students will be able to integrate to the job market more easily because they don't need to learn custom tech.

PC ports and BC will be the norm.

It was amazing to see custom engines drawing every bit of power out of some exotic architecture like Cell but it is 2023 and it is impossible to play MGS4 on PC without compromising stuff.

People where discussing universal console architecture a few years back. This is pretty much the same without sacrificing competition at the hw level.

To me that's a positive net result towards the future.

Speak for yourself for on this i'm playing Metal gear solid 4 on a laptop with better framerates than the original hardware in 2023

 

[Roman Empire]

What are you smoking? Consoles going the PC route and being easier to develop is a good thing, and no one is holding console manufacturers at gunpoint and demanding they stop innovating with odd technologies and novel concepts.

Now about the engines... There are a bunch of studios using proprietary engines.

 

[systemr123]

Maybe because those 1981 systems were harder to get your hands on and emulate thanks to the difficulty of tracking down a console or getting a decent enough PC to run them? PCs were far harder to build then. Less people were also interested in playing 80s games in the 2000s because.... there were less people playing video games, back then.

You're able to reminisce about the 'good old days' today because of the advancements in technology and the ability to emulate old games and play remasters of them on any console you want. don't forget that

Somehow I really want Cities Skylines 2 to be on UE5 plus, it would really benefit from it with the new loading techniques and massive max world/scene sizes, but no that game will still release using Unity engine. So I guess it’s not all UE5 plus, even when it’d be an obviously better choice.

 

[Mikado]

Selfishly - as an SPU programmer at the time of the PS3 - I really enjoyed working with it from a "this is an interesting project" point of view, and particularly for Exclusives where I could go HAM on Cell-friendly schemes. I did not particularly enjoy the GPU on the PS3 but part of the fun was offloading things to the SPU and scheduling work accordingly - a skill which is still useful on the more forgiving hardware of the Current Era.

But, the fun dried up on projects where everything was expected to be ported to every platform. Generally in those cases, the Xbox would be the Lead Platform and designs would be drawn around that (and it's superior GPU and simpler multithreading model), and the PS3 versions became a series of compromises - by the same token, we couldn't do things that were hardcore Cell-friendly because they didn't map well to the Xbox.

I don't especially miss the Old Ways as we have enough challenges in development now without tricking weird hardware into working, but I wasn't miserable at the time either.

 

[TonyK]

This video from Epic shows 40 different areas and they all have a varied look to them.

Video is amazing, but as usual with U5 videos I'm worried about the framerate. Everything with that demo quality seems to run at 24fps, 30fps at best.

 

[demented waffle]

Like in the title, don't you see where we are heading. These are sad times, stripped of magic of unknown magical hardware chips and secret homemade game engines.

Soon we will ask not what engine the game uses, but which version of UE.

And we will just ask about console's GPU, CPU (TF) and other components.

Is this an over-reaction to a few bad console ports? Let those motherfuckers rot.

Haven't bought a new pc game in at least a year crew.

 

[A.Romero]

Speak for yourself for on this i'm playing Metal gear solid 4 on a laptop with better framerates than the original hardware in 2023

Really? Last time I checked (a couple of months ago) emulation was still not perfect and several specific configurations have to be made (going by this https://wiki.rpcs3.net/index.php?title=Metal_Gear_Solid_4:_Guns_of_the_Patriots)

Big win, if it does work well without jumping through hoops.

However, it's still no match to just installing from Steam or some platform and run it, like official PC releases.

 

[CGNoire]

Hot take ......GOOD!

Game Engine Software/Tech changes so fast and are hodged podged together so often that game devs have to constantly relearn new ways of doing stuff. One of the greaf benefits of everyone on UE5 is that for once we might end up with sweeps of teams all with people who have "Mastered" the software.

Thats one of the reasons for Future Shock is the constantly shifting tech you can never quite get to "full" grips with. Allways relearning the ropes, never reaching journeyman status. If devs share there tips and techniques together we could have an industry wide network of R&D on UE.

 

[M1chl]

I hope gold like:
4A Engine
ID Tech 7
Decima
Forza Tech
...few others which I can't pull from my head at the moment...

Will get preserved, other games can be easily improved to switch to Unreal 5 + plugi-ns

Granted only true next gen engine would be something like ID Tech 7 + lumen. Unreal 5 CPU part isn't really all that different from 4. The P2P architecture of ID Tech 7 is why it runs on anything and you know....actually utilizes given HW.....

Also seeing how devs are struggling to hit 30 FPS with RT, bodes well for "fake" solution by UE.

I doubt, that 4a will be sourcing out their engine, even tho, they released mod tools:
4A Releases Metro Exodus Mod Support Tools Amid Ukraine War (escapistmagazine.com)

So we might get some mileage out of it.

 

[lukilladog]

Ideally you want to see more engines/renderers for innovation. Unreal Engine has been stuttering and hitching since UE3, so I'm not excited.

 

[Fafalada]

IF you have skilled devs. If you don't, it will be exactly as it was before.

Well - no, not really. UE games still have certain common attributes that have persisted for over 2 decades now - and I'm not talking about positives.
Not to say any other tech stack is flawless (quite the opposite - lots of proprietary tech has big issues of its own) but there are things that just fundamentally never get addressed in some middleware - no matter who uses it.

Oh no, there'll be no proprietary engines left! With the exception of ...

Lumberyard

Lumberyard no longer exists - there's O3DE, but that's a completely different beast (and not proprietary either).

 

[YeulEmeralda]

Life is Strange was UE3.
Dragon Quest 11 was UE4.


Art style> engine.

 

[SNG32]

Really? Last time I checked (a couple of months ago) emulation was still not perfect and several specific configurations have to be made (going by this https://wiki.rpcs3.net/index.php?title=Metal_Gear_Solid_4:_Guns_of_the_Patriots)

Big win, if it does work well without jumping through hoops.

However, it's still no match to just installing from Steam or some platform and run it, like official PC releases.

There's game patches that you can use to make it play better. I have it running between 40 - 60 fps which is much better then the 20 - 30 range you get from the PS3 version. Obviously it would be much better released on steam with a native PC release. But it's still impressive that it can run on PC on a laptop at that. PC gaming is all about tinkering some games that play perfectly on steam can suddenly be thrown off in an update. That's the blessing and the curse to PC gaming. You can do so much but it does require some effort.

 

[YeulEmeralda]

I know that we have a lot of "I don't care I just like to press buttons" crowd here but you guys have to agree that A LOT of unreal engine games looks very similar (in terms of visual) to each other....

Maybe the biggest problem is that devs get "lazy" and use too much of the pre baked stuff that engine offers but that doesn't change the fact that companies having different e engines help in games having a more distinct presentation.

A lot of games look similar because developers are creatively bankrupt asshats chasing trends.


And that's nothing new. Remember the GTA clones?

 

[A.Romero]

There's game patches that you can use to make it play better. I have it running between 40 - 60 fps which is much better then the 20 - 30 range you get from the PS3 version. Obviously it would be much better released on steam with a native PC release. But it's still impressive that it can run on PC on a laptop at that. PC gaming is all about tinkering some games that play perfectly on steam can suddenly be thrown off in an update. That's the blessing and the curse to PC gaming. You can do so much but it does require some effort.

Definitely better and it is impressive indeed. However, my point in the post you quoted was that one of the upsides of using an universal engine would be precisely avoiding situations like this.

I'm PC gamer first, console second. I like to tiker once in a while but most of the time I rather just play, ideally with no compromises. Still, I agree with you, it's best to have the option and go as deep as you want instead of being limited by the platform.

 

[Azurro]

The beauty of unreal is that if you find something an engine can't do, cool, it's open enough that you could code a plugin.

And bespoke features? You mean like the "breathing systems" in TLOU PT 2 that determined when a character started breathing heavier that in reality unless I told you about it you'd have ZERO idea it was there? Those bespoke time and development wasting features these engines have done that have ballooned cost and development time need to come to an end.

I'm a developer but not for games, so what I say might be misleading, but that doesn't sound like a feature necessarily at the engine level. Whatever game system tracks the activity of a character would have some sort of flag to tell the animation system te play out the breathing heaver animation for that character, so it'd be at the game simulations level.

So, UE or not, Naughty Dog would have probably wasted their time on that either way.

 

[tygertrip]

Maybe because those 1981 systems were harder to get your hands on and emulate thanks to the difficulty of tracking down a console or getting a decent enough PC to run them? PCs were far harder to build then. Less people were also interested in playing 80s games in the 2000s because.... there were less people playing video games, back then.

You're able to reminisce about the 'good old days' today because of the advancements in technology and the ability to emulate old games and play remasters of them on any console you want. don't forget that

I was playing emulated arcade, Atari, Genesis, and SNES games on PC in the late 90s. You make it sound like it was some super secret club that you needed a $100,000 super computer to join. Plenty of us were playing with emulators back then. If you aren’t going to research and just run off at the mouth, maybe you should stick to topics you actually experienced.

 

[KuraiShidosha]

I agree with OP. It's been my fear for a few years now as things really start to gravitate towards these rather boring standardization of everything. The excitement and magic of custom hardware and engines is long gone.

 

[rofif]

I've watched this today. Consoles, though more similar to PC architecture than ever, are still significantly different.
It's not just "a mid spec pc". 1 ram pool, architecture, no directx, low level hardware and ssd access, reading data directly through IO, instead of moving to ram and back, different bandwidth and so on.
It's in fact so different, that it's not an easy "click" and you have pc version or ps5 version.
That's at least on ps5 side. xbox side is a bit more universal for better or worse.
Again - I totally agre with op as said few post earlier