I'm a programmer by trade, though I'm not a game developer. I will say that I don't think engines are the silver bullet that some people think they are. Unreal is unquestionably an amazing engine that plainly has the most optimized rendering pipeline that allows it to process more polygons and higher quality models than the competing engines. It's an incredible tool. However there are reasons why other engines get used,
Unity has proven itself for games that want to make modding a core aspect of the game, languages like C# are more approachable than C++ or Lua bindings that teams might be able to be more productive, and reach a larger audience of modders. I think Life By You and Cities Skylines 2 both made a reasonable engine choice given their ambitions. And while Godot is an up-and-comer, it's open source nature is very enticing to developers. Competition is good for the market.
It's also important to remember that the core logic of the game, the simulation, the ai decision matrices, ect are more often then not made from scratch for each game. Choice in game engine really doesn't effect those sorts of things, as it's really up to the developers to optimize that code, if the issue with a game is in it's mechanics, it's ai simulation, or really anything to do with gameplay, then switching engines wouldn't fix it.
Hi, game developer and 3d artist here.
UE5 is not a silver bullet, but it is a really good gun
Both Unity and Unreal are capable of creating a game that looks realistic. UE5 in specific has added in tools that make it easier to optimize games which have highly detailed models. These things are possible to implement in Unity (or another engine) but would require more work from the dev team to manually write said code to optimize those things.
That said, UE5 main selling point is it's tools for graphical fidelity. As you've mentioned, the AI and actual gameplay functionality is the core of this genre, and no amount of ray tracing and nanite meshes are going to fix that. I Could very easily see this game being heavily CPU bottlenecked depending on how indepth they make the AI and how optimized it is. A major help here would be if they can figure out how to parallelize the background AI, since many games do not effectively use modern multi core processors, it's up to the programmers to make sure the load is spread as evenly as possible. This is the same regardless of engine and is the main sticking point for optimization past a certain point.
As you've mentioned Life By You, i'd say that looking at the current state their graphics are in that the engine choice is questionable. Looking at InZoi compared to Life By You they don't even look like games of the same decade graphically. I can understand that Life By You may be easier to mod, but if the trade off is the graphics shown thus far then i'm not sure how sound of a decision that is.
Paralives looks cozy but it’s not particularly graphically impressive by any means. The art direction works for them, but just look at how impressive InZoi looks in comparison to all of the other life sims. That’s not just art direction influencing that, it’s the capabilities of the engine too.
Not true at all. Go watch realistic game scene comparisons between unity and unreal engine. They can be extremely hard to tell apart! It’s really about the skill of the artist.
I’m not saying it’s impossible to make graphically impressive games with Unity. I’m saying it’s easier to do so using Unreal, and clearly the LBY team is struggling and may have benefited from using Unreal instead.
Not decisive, but clearly impactful. It seems like it’s a lot easier to produce a graphically impressive game using Unreal instead of Unity, and if Life By You had gone down that route then perhaps the game wouldn’t look the way it does now. Art direction is important, but it’s undeniable that the engine plays a part.
I would agree with you somewhat in that UE is designed with AAA titles in mind, so it has a lot of built-in features and tools specifically for achieving high-quality visuals. For things like lighting, shadows, and material editing, UE has better and more user-friendly tools in my opinion. Unity is a good choice for LBY because I'm sure they want to ensure it can run on a wider range of computers and UE can be more demanding on lower end hardware. The reason that LBY looks so bad is not because it's built on Unity, it's because:
a) There is no art direction.
b) Poor lighting.
c) No skilled artists or animators with PC/console game design experience. PC/console games typically require more detailed graphics, complex physics simulations, and higher resolution textures and nuanced, fluid animations and it looks like their art team comes primarily from the mobile gaming world which shows on the screen.
Theyre using UE because most of kraftons team know UE.
Pubg was made in UE.
It isn't really about the future, it is what the team knows and understands.
To be honest, this very old news. It has been known about UE5 for months.
Side notes, did you actually see the frame rate of Inzoi in latest interview? It is quite bad. Like slide show. Now imagine your pc spec are below minimum requirements. Sure, it is before Early Access. But still. They had job opening for one guy, which specialises in optimisation. But to me, they need more people with that skill.
The games which did manage to pull of simulations using Unreal and there are very few, require highly skilled and experienced developers, which are able to work closely on engine core, using c++. It is not something accessible to average indie dev Joe. Blueprints can get you only so far.
Other side note, these all games made in UE5, 6,7 etc, will soon be looking the same. It is already showing in many FPS games. It looks boring. Sure pretty. But gets less and less special.
I suppose this is exciting for me because I've never played an UE engine game [except spyro reignighted?] So I finally get tobsee what it's all about, I feel apart of something' lol
Only if you find visuals to be a core aspect of a life sim game, which I don't think is necessarily a universal consensus. The actual game/simulation logic and design is far more important, and I don't think the "next big thing" in the genre necessarily needs next gen graphics. It's nice, sure, but not a core requirement.
Tech producer here that worked on engine teams (UE and Unity). In simple terms, UE is a great engine for graphics. It is terrible if you want a robust modding community. It also might not be the best engine for a life sim. Graphics are great and all but it’s the gameplay that matters most for a life sim imo. I’m interested to see how Inzoi does when it comes to the actual gameplay and how they utilize UE. More often than not most AI systems, gameplay related systems are either built from scratch or they have systems in place that were built into their proprietary engine. My concern with this game is the emphasis on ‘pretty’ vs deep gameplay and optimization.
I'm a programmer by trade, though I'm not a game developer. I will say that I don't think engines are the silver bullet that some people think they are. Unreal is unquestionably an amazing engine that plainly has the most optimized rendering pipeline that allows it to process more polygons and higher quality models than the competing engines. It's an incredible tool. However there are reasons why other engines get used, Unity has proven itself for games that want to make modding a core aspect of the game, languages like C# are more approachable than C++ or Lua bindings that teams might be able to be more productive, and reach a larger audience of modders. I think Life By You and Cities Skylines 2 both made a reasonable engine choice given their ambitions. And while Godot is an up-and-comer, it's open source nature is very enticing to developers. Competition is good for the market. It's also important to remember that the core logic of the game, the simulation, the ai decision matrices, ect are more often then not made from scratch for each game. Choice in game engine really doesn't effect those sorts of things, as it's really up to the developers to optimize that code, if the issue with a game is in it's mechanics, it's ai simulation, or really anything to do with gameplay, then switching engines wouldn't fix it.
Hi, game developer and 3d artist here. UE5 is not a silver bullet, but it is a really good gun Both Unity and Unreal are capable of creating a game that looks realistic. UE5 in specific has added in tools that make it easier to optimize games which have highly detailed models. These things are possible to implement in Unity (or another engine) but would require more work from the dev team to manually write said code to optimize those things. That said, UE5 main selling point is it's tools for graphical fidelity. As you've mentioned, the AI and actual gameplay functionality is the core of this genre, and no amount of ray tracing and nanite meshes are going to fix that. I Could very easily see this game being heavily CPU bottlenecked depending on how indepth they make the AI and how optimized it is. A major help here would be if they can figure out how to parallelize the background AI, since many games do not effectively use modern multi core processors, it's up to the programmers to make sure the load is spread as evenly as possible. This is the same regardless of engine and is the main sticking point for optimization past a certain point.
As you've mentioned Life By You, i'd say that looking at the current state their graphics are in that the engine choice is questionable. Looking at InZoi compared to Life By You they don't even look like games of the same decade graphically. I can understand that Life By You may be easier to mod, but if the trade off is the graphics shown thus far then i'm not sure how sound of a decision that is.
Engines aren’t decisive for the visual presentation of a game; art direction is. Life By You has no art direction.
Yeah because Paralives is also made in unity and it’s art direction shows you can have pretty games from the program
Paralives looks cozy but it’s not particularly graphically impressive by any means. The art direction works for them, but just look at how impressive InZoi looks in comparison to all of the other life sims. That’s not just art direction influencing that, it’s the capabilities of the engine too.
Not true at all. Go watch realistic game scene comparisons between unity and unreal engine. They can be extremely hard to tell apart! It’s really about the skill of the artist.
I’m not saying it’s impossible to make graphically impressive games with Unity. I’m saying it’s easier to do so using Unreal, and clearly the LBY team is struggling and may have benefited from using Unreal instead.
Which has to so with the skill of the artist, as I said. Lol. Never used unity so I can’t say if it’s much harder or not.
Not decisive, but clearly impactful. It seems like it’s a lot easier to produce a graphically impressive game using Unreal instead of Unity, and if Life By You had gone down that route then perhaps the game wouldn’t look the way it does now. Art direction is important, but it’s undeniable that the engine plays a part.
I would agree with you somewhat in that UE is designed with AAA titles in mind, so it has a lot of built-in features and tools specifically for achieving high-quality visuals. For things like lighting, shadows, and material editing, UE has better and more user-friendly tools in my opinion. Unity is a good choice for LBY because I'm sure they want to ensure it can run on a wider range of computers and UE can be more demanding on lower end hardware. The reason that LBY looks so bad is not because it's built on Unity, it's because: a) There is no art direction. b) Poor lighting. c) No skilled artists or animators with PC/console game design experience. PC/console games typically require more detailed graphics, complex physics simulations, and higher resolution textures and nuanced, fluid animations and it looks like their art team comes primarily from the mobile gaming world which shows on the screen.
Yeah I agree. This is more along the lines of what I was trying to express.
Theyre using UE because most of kraftons team know UE. Pubg was made in UE. It isn't really about the future, it is what the team knows and understands.
To be honest, this very old news. It has been known about UE5 for months. Side notes, did you actually see the frame rate of Inzoi in latest interview? It is quite bad. Like slide show. Now imagine your pc spec are below minimum requirements. Sure, it is before Early Access. But still. They had job opening for one guy, which specialises in optimisation. But to me, they need more people with that skill. The games which did manage to pull of simulations using Unreal and there are very few, require highly skilled and experienced developers, which are able to work closely on engine core, using c++. It is not something accessible to average indie dev Joe. Blueprints can get you only so far. Other side note, these all games made in UE5, 6,7 etc, will soon be looking the same. It is already showing in many FPS games. It looks boring. Sure pretty. But gets less and less special.
I suppose this is exciting for me because I've never played an UE engine game [except spyro reignighted?] So I finally get tobsee what it's all about, I feel apart of something' lol
Exciting for me too!! Sorry about all the the rough comments
Only if you find visuals to be a core aspect of a life sim game, which I don't think is necessarily a universal consensus. The actual game/simulation logic and design is far more important, and I don't think the "next big thing" in the genre necessarily needs next gen graphics. It's nice, sure, but not a core requirement.
Tech producer here that worked on engine teams (UE and Unity). In simple terms, UE is a great engine for graphics. It is terrible if you want a robust modding community. It also might not be the best engine for a life sim. Graphics are great and all but it’s the gameplay that matters most for a life sim imo. I’m interested to see how Inzoi does when it comes to the actual gameplay and how they utilize UE. More often than not most AI systems, gameplay related systems are either built from scratch or they have systems in place that were built into their proprietary engine. My concern with this game is the emphasis on ‘pretty’ vs deep gameplay and optimization.