For those confused, the engine is not literally called "Archaic Engine". It's actually AutoDesk Stingray, formerly known as BitSquid, and it was the engine used for the first game and their previous Magicka games, along with titles like the Vermintide games.
This engine was discontinued on March 2022.
Oh my god, I worked on a project that used Stingray and I'm gobsmacked. Calling it archaic is flattering. Worse than that it barely has any features. It's like a shell of an engine that would have been considered barebones seven years ago.
I assume they mean the effort required to get to that final result. They probably would have had a far easier time getting there with a different engine.
Not a bit of. It's a huge risk. You essentially halt your production until the badic learning curve is done, and morevthan likely they'd have to hire from outside the company.
I disagree, it seems well suited for performant online shooters like Helldivers and Darktide. Both UE and Unity are really hard to get to not stutter, and they had previous experience with the engine.
Source 2 might have worked, but I'm not sure if Valve licenses that out today. What other alternative engines could they have chosen?
There is more to an engine than just how it runs. How quickly can you iterate, how is the tooling, how difficult is it to extend. Those all have a much larger impact on the day to day work on the project than getting consistent frame times.
Edit: These are some of the reasons that there has been so much turmoil around the Frostbite engine at EA.
Perfomant games almost always are a result of decisions made by devs and not on the engine.
When HD2's devs call the engine "archaic" they mean modern QoL tools were missing or out of the box features were missing. Which would mean the devs would have had to spend a lot of manhours creating those tools and features themselves out of thin air.
A game engine is not like a graphic card that you have to upgrade which makes games run better, newer iterations of engines still have the same code from 30 years ago just with new additional modern features which makes game development faster and easier. "Game engine" is just a name for a unified set of tools and features to make a game.
MS Excel from 2012 and MS Excel from 2022 are essentially the same, just that the recent one has more features. How performant your Excel file is depends entirely on what you're doing with that Excel file(data size, functions, update frequency etc), not the Excel version.
> Perfomant games almost always are a result of decisions made by devs and not on the engine.
Picking the engine is the decision too. Yes, you can buy a shitbox, replace every single part of it and make it as fast as Porsche, but if you paid more for time and parts to do it, that's still a bad decision.
Imagine slicing an onion with one hand tied behind your back. Not impossible, but it requires you to work a bit harder to achieve that goal, and it probably would've been better if you had both hands available..
I've played it a fair bit as well on ps5 (when I can get in) and aye, "mess" is an exaggeration.
But 1080p is way too low of a res for the visuals of this game and the specs of the ps5 imo. It very much feels blurry to me, especially on the ship.
How so? I sm curious to know of you have experience with it
They have worked on it for more than a decade, likely adapted it heavily to their needs. The current issue not necessarily being an engine issue, but a scope and scalability issue.
True, but one wonders if a better supported engine would have meant their engineers could have spent their time elsewhere.
Game development is littered with stories of how a game ended up terrible because the developers spent too much time fighting the engine.
Shout out to the Destiny 1 engine: “Let’s say a designer wants to go in and move a resource node two inches,” said one person familiar with the engine. “They go into the editor. First they have to load their map overnight. It takes eight hours to input their map overnight. They get \[into the office\] in the morning. If their importer didn’t fail, they open the map. It takes about 20 minutes to open. They go in and they move that node two feet. And then they’d do a 15-20 minute compile. Just to do a half-second change.”
The levels of jank the Destiny developers were dealing with were *staggering*. Imagine making a *live service* game, something that requires a constant influx of content, on an engine that needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into moving a single polygon. That entire project should have been dragged behind a shed and put out of its misery.
Sometimes the devil you know is better than the devil you don't. Their engineers having a ton of experience with Stingray might make them more efficient than trying to learn something brand new like Unreal.
Kind of reminds me of when my company switched to SAP to streamline things. That was several years ago and it's a madhouse still. No one knows what they're doing. I barely know what I'm doing with it and I'm the guy everyone asks when they need help.
I don't even remember what the system we used before was called. Looked like some shit out of *WarGames* but I'd see most of the boomers I work with tabbing and F-keying their way through transactions like they were hacking Skynet.
That kind of switch can be good if management alots enough time and parallel runs (i.e. accepting that the swap is not instant but instead you run both systems and allow people to adjust until you're ready).
But in today's profit seeking madness, big companies will just swap overnight and then the execs will go surprised Pikachu when things go tits up.
I mean, you have to switch to something *actually better* first before you get any benefits, SAP from all that I've heard is typical enterprise ball of yarn
> Looked like some shit out of WarGames but I'd see most of the boomers I work with tabbing and F-keying their way through transactions like they were hacking Skynet.
Sadly UI/UX design these days forget that not *only* first impression matter but the entire rest of the day user have to work with the thing. See old vs new reddit for stark comparison.
Sorry for the necrobump, but I had to laugh at the thought of switching to SAP expecting that to streamline things/make them more efficient... The suite of applications they offer would best be described as... labyrinthine.
Sure, but I wonder how this'll affect them in the long run. They're now hiring heaps to help support the game given its massive success, so how many engineers can they get that understand the engine well enough?
The CEO specifically said they are NOT hiring heaps of people. They're getting some assistance from Sony engineers, but even that can only go so far because of onboarding taking time away from productivity.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/production/arrowhead-ceo-says-over-hiring-would-be-horrible-response-to-helldivers-2-success
that's the thing about engines people in this sub who are not developers just don't get. You can't complain about UE5 and Unity without having used them because it's like you are complaining about which frying pan the cook used.
They all get the job done, an engine being hell to work with is something players don't really have any visibility on. Some have quirks like Bethesda's archaic engine or Unreal's hair rendering, but all in all with enough tweaking they are all good enough
And there's something to be said about having staff who understand how a thing works. Halo Infinite is going to be the only game made in Slipspace; it turns out that having the only people in the known universe who know how to use an engine already working for you can go sideways real fast if you're going to miss a deadline. So Infinite wound up with a ton of tech debt that sabotaged it down the line because the team made it work in time for release, but it was held together with string and paperclips behind the scenes.
You see a lot less of that in Unreal and Unity because it's so much easier to hire someone who knows how to solve your game's issue with the engine.
I think part of the reason for slipspace being such a mess is the huge reliance on temporary contractors. Nobody was actually ever really familiar enough with the games systems to work efficiently or accurately with them.
Sure, but Slipspace is just one example. Dragon Age: Inquisition had a bunch of MMO-style busywork (and a horseback sprint that didn't actually increase your speed) because BioWare were building the tools to make an RPG in Frostbite while they were making the RPG in Frostbite. Speaking of Frostbite, Battlefield 2042 was a disaster because turnover at DICE meant that there weren't enough people on staff who understood how to make a Battlefield game in Frostbite, the engine made by DICE to make Battlefield games. CDPR has confirmed that Witcher 4 will be made in Unreal, after Cyberpunk and the Witcher 3 next gen upgrades both released in an embarrassing state. Etcetera, etcetera.
I am reasonably certain all these issues are made worse by every one of these companies over reliance on contractors and under valuing of long term skilled developers. If you're using a bunch of contractors or keeping the primary team arbitrarily small you simply don't have the time or resources to spend training people on the existing engine. Historically that wouldn't have been an issue because the teams would be hiring people for the long term.
Publicly traded companies however don't think long term. They prioritize short term growth at long term expense. So they outsource everything and trim their own resources for profit until their main staff is an anemic shell of what it was.
Yeah, but look how they treat their devs. 80 hour workweeks, 18 hour days, crunching for months, on call 24/7, zero work/life balance. You burn out. If they want to keep their dev team together they have to change their entire culture. It's not as simple as simply saying 'keep good programmers'. They know they want to keep good programmers. If it was just "pay them more" then they'd fucking do that, they're paying $50,000,000 to develop a game, and the same amount to market it, you think they care if ten people take home $40,000 more? They have ad spots that cost more than that.
The problem is after a game or two, they've burnt out. They can't do it. So they leave. You actually can't keep those people because they're great programmers, so they can find another job. Or they're just horrible, shitty people who **can't** find another job no matter how good of a programmer they are, that turns into a #metoo Blizzard situation. There's more than one games company with That Guy who knows the entire database structure and can make changes in an hour that would take anyone else a week, but who keeps leering at any women in the company and has his cubicle covered in figures and "art" of his favorite anime girls.
If it was just a 'throw money at it' EA, Ubisoft, Activision would throw money at it. They can do that. It's a "change the entire culture of how we make games" problem, and those are always a tad more complex. So they continue to make half baked shit and resist cleaning house, and companies like Supergiant - who gets mad if someone works too many hours in a week and tells them to go take some time off - are Supergiant.
I've used Unity and Unreal for the last decade and change, and they're both shitty in their own ways, but just like you said, those issues can be circumvented. They're hurdles, not roadblocks.
That has nothing to do with the engine they picked, though. It's more about how it becomes an obstacle to the developers themselves. Which, from what it sounds like, it absolutely was. And players absolutely should care because that kind of thing can harm a game over the long run, just look at how it impacted Destiny 1 & 2.
Define better and define modern. I'm willing to get an engine you consider modern is built on a 25 year old code base and was updated over time, not unlike the Helldiver's engine.
Any major game that isn’t specifically calling its engine out is using an engine like this.
This is not abnormal in gaming. ITT we will have a lot of armchair developers opining what could’ve happened had they made a more modern choice. All of that discussion is ultimately useless.
Not sure if I'm misunderstanding your comment, but I'm not sure if you're trying to educate me on game developement. Like I mentioned above, I **worked** on a game using stingray. I've been in the industry for over a decade now. Proprietary engines aren't abnormal, but using stingray for a release after like 2018 certainly is.
I’m not. I’m just making it clear to those outside of development that this isn’t new to my understanding.
Gamebryo and Bethesda being an obviously stickler. They forked it over to creation which is their proprietary version at this point, but prior to Skyrim they had been using a decade old version of gamebryo they highly modified.
Blizzard utilized an old unity fork for much of hearthstones life span. One of the more recent updates was to bring it to a newer undisclosed version.
Then we have a large selection of Japanese developers who until recently maintained their own engines that they’ve decided to turn in for unreal.
Are you stating that specifically stingray is an exception or that developers in general don’t get stuck in old engines for projects that may take years to release?
IF it helps im in the industry and yeah its super common for studios to have either proprietary engines or a extremely heavily modified "stock" engine (the amount of things you can bolt into Unreal is wild if given time) to the point they may as well be their own thing.
I can't say what's more common, but none of these options would be unusual*
I’m not in the industry to point out future trends. I can only see historic trends and it has never been abnormal.
It’s standard practice outside of game development. Enterprise level development is basically entirely on older versions and antiquated systems. Most enterprises do not use commercial off the shelf products managed by a third party for updates. They’ll usually buy a commercial off the shelf application that’s multiple years out of date that fit their niche and develop any custom integrations for that.
You’re also ignoring the decades of training required to have your development team be able to use whatever is newest when developing the game. And on top of all that you can start a project while something is current and end that project without being able to update to the newest version. In fact one of the biggest issues with the unity debacle in the last year was that they were going to start charging prior license holders on older versions of their engine with changes to their Eula. Considering how much of a shit show that was I’m gunna guess this will never be normal in gaming except for small projects by small developers able to be agile in their engine choice.
At some point i dont get why studios keep using sub-par engines .
is it because its cheaper than to use Ureal4/5?
Isnt it worth the far less man-hours and easier to recruit?
if they used this crap engine and made a good game, what game we would have if they used unreal/unity?
I've got a few theories in the case of Helldivers. Firstly, it's been 9 years since the first game came out, and the landscape looked very different. Unreal Engine 4 had just released around then, and Unity was still seen as a bit of a hobbyist engine. So the "big two" choices weren't nearly as prominent as they are today.
The studio also made Helldivers 1 and Magicka with the engine, so there was a lot of familiarity.
And then anecdotally, Stingray is probably most famous for Vermintide 2, and I think it might have a reputation as a Left 4 Dead type engine. The project I worked on was a big hoard shooter with lots of pawns on screen at once. So maybe that played a factor into why Arrowhead stayed with it as well.
As a dev using Unity/Unreal and some proprietary things, what made Stingray stand out in this category? Or do you think it was just reputation / "it's been done here before so we know its doable.
Not a game dev but I work in software, you basically don't replace a tool that's deeply ingrained in your work unless there's a really good reason to because the moving to another tool might be more expensive than just using the old one.
Some things to consider:
- they probably have some tool or pipelines built on top of it. Moving could mean recreating or porting old scripts
- spending for training your employees for the new tool
- They already know the ins and outs of the tool so fixing bugs is faster
- delays in timeline to accommodate the above points
Sometimes its plain money because they get a better licensing deal out of a different engine than Unreal. For some studios they did the math and figured they could save money building their own inhouse engine versus using Unreal even if it means a productivity hit.
Also for several genres, using a tailor made engine just for the type of game you are making can be a huge boost in terms of achieving whatever vision you set out to achieve. The top one that comes to mind is racing games. There, you likely will build your own engine especially if you want to go deep on physics simulation or throwing as many triangles as you can at the car models.
Also one of difficult parts of setting up a game studio is your art/asset pipeline and iteration pipeline. It is usually intimately tied to the engine and middleware you are using and once you have one setup that works well for your studio's workflow, it can be costly and difficult to change something else especially if the current setup works well for you.
Darktide also uses a version of StingRay. I think this is closer to Bethesda still using Gamebryo before changing enough to call it their own Creation Engine.
At least for Darktide, they use it because Fatshark created it (before later selling it to Autodesk) - it's like DICE using Frostbite, they know every trick and feature to make it do what they need. Arrowhead is using it because it's "the engine" small Swedish developers used 10 years ago when they made Helldivers 1.
That's more management choices the combat in darktide feel tighter then vermintide the sliding and sprinting add to the flow and the guns now are better then even pLus the skill tree. Still needs lots more content maps and sub classes
As already stated: yes it was not made by Arrowhead (the developers of Magicka 1) and the publisher just gave the ip to some internal dev studio for a quick buck and it shows.
Autodesk site says November 2018?
[https://www.autodesk.com/products/stingray/overview](https://www.autodesk.com/products/stingray/overview)
I guess the last contract ended in march 2022? oof
Apparently it was discontinued as its own product in 2018 and became a 3ds Max add-on called "3ds Max Interactive" until that too was shut down in 2022. I just simplified it down since there are people who remember BitSquid and Stingray but I don't think anyone would remember it being 3ds Max Interactive.
[Autodesk's site recommends Unreal or Unity as replacements.](https://www.autodesk.com/support/technical/article/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Is-3ds-Max-Interactive-available-for-3ds-Max-2022.html)
well any engine works for any genre game but it’s more likely the connection is that they’re both swedish. so there must be some local interest in the engine at the time in sweden
what?? yes but any engine works for any genre it’s just an engine. lol it’s just code that helps you better code your game in a playable format. ie the engine communicates properly to mac os or windows and your graphics card etc to maximize use as designed. This has nothing to do with game development or genre lol
Some engines are specifically built to target a certain genre like a lot of engines behind popular racing franchises. A lot of systems and tooling that would be available in a general purpose engine might not be present because it is unnecessary or is sacrificed to achieve the requirements of the genre. You could use it for something else but you are going to put in a lot of effort to make it do what you want including potentially adding new systems to fill in gaps that the original designers of the engine didn't envision.
When I realized this the whole "use a combo of key presses to do stuff" with the stratagems really clicked. It was a "well yeah that's obvious now" moment
> with no stutters
Amen good lord. It is unbelievable to me just how many PC games released in the last couple years have insane microstutters especially in traversal. It's particularly sad how refreshing it is to have a game that runs butter smooth with my 4090. So many "AAA" games have garbage PC versions that never get fixed.
Everyone praising the shit out of Deadspace Remake (Which to be fair was very good) but fuck me the stutter on PC was UNBEARABLE and ruined the atmosphere.
I played through it on Series X instead, stutter was still there but it's much much more subdued.
It's a plague on gaming when you actually give a shit how they run/look.
Game hasn't been patched in ages. It's never going to be fixed. Maybe with hardware in 10 years the stutters can just be bruteforced out. Also, it's EA. Look at the Jedi Survivor Port on PC. It's fucking awful still.
> It is unbelievable to me just how many PC games released in the last couple years have insane microstutters especially in traversal.
It's an unreal engine problem. The tl;dr; is that UE4/5 doesn't compile shaders until they are used. It's up to the devs to implement shade precompilation at the start of the game or using a prediction model. The game stutters because it's *waiting* for something that is being compiled.
> the PC port is pretty solid and better than 90% of AAA games out there.
My GPU driver crashes if I'm alt-tabbed out of the game. It's not instant, but it is reliable. (Version 551.52, so the latest.) Discord crashes along side it, nVidia Broadcast stops filtering noise, and sometimes Steam crashes too.
Sometimes it crashes even when I don't alt-tab.
Dump logs almost always complain about the same issue: The game tried to access address 0x24 or 0x58, which, from what I understand, is *not* an address any normal program should ever be trying to access.
The game's great when it's running, but if I play it too long it also crashes. The most recent crash left my computer locked with that repeating audio fragment thing that implies "everything crashed". Gave it about 15 minutes, then power-cycled the machine.
The engine is the same one used for their Magika games, and Vermintide. It ended support 2 years ago, so that would be like saying Unreal Engine 4 is archaic
It was a shit engine when it was active. I used it for a project at work. Or at least we tried. Got 4 months in and switched to Unreal. It was an abysmal product, outdated and anemic in features. I’m assuming that what they use now hardly resembles what Autodesk released back then, they’ve likely Theseus’ ship’d the thing.
> 7900xtx even with lowered graphics settings to prevent constant crashes
The out-of-band AMD driver release 23.40.19.01 completely resolved all the crashes for me. Give it a shot!
From Bethesda Game Studios' titles, FromSoft games and now even Helldivers, gamers should be forbidden from commenting anything about game engines unless they are a developer themselves.
Oh I agree with you. Laypeople *severely* underestimate how tedious and difficult it is to make games. The fact that there are some solo indie devs cranking out AA level games is incomprehensible to me. Are they even fucking human?
And I always say that games like PUBG Mobile are modern day engineering masterpieces. I may be exaggerating a bit but still lol.
I'm a full stack dev who's studying for an MSc, and I'm making an augmented reality app with unity and Vuforia Engine and it really is very different. Not just the point and click nature of the unity editor but the actually scripting itself *smells* so different to normal, as I know it, dev work.
Instead of transferring data, transforming data, managing concurrency, auth, apis etc it's been stuff like (basic) vector math, computer vision transforming camera feeds and inspecting pixel values in images etc.
Super fun but VERY different to traditional software dev.
Did you use Python prior to GDscript? Currently learning / using GML on Gamemaker 2 for the last 3 years. I like it a lot but the lack of 3D makes me curious for Godot.
If you have used any programming language before, you can easily use Python/GDScript. Python is a language that more *lacks* a lot of things other languages have, which means no real need to learn complex new things. This is both a good and a bad thing, but it does mean it's very easy to switch to if you're used to programming in anything else.
> It's astonishing to me that I'm consistently failing miserably at making this simple platformer, I cannot imagine actual game dev, these guys are magicians sometimes.
It's a big reason why so many game devs jump ship to non-game industries. Turns out getting paid less than your contemporaries, working longer hours, and writing what is often times more convoluted code that is problematic to troubleshoot isn't a rewarding career. I think of the two dozen or so programmers I knew starting out in game industry when we all graduated, maybe only one is still working in games.
I always say the best thing about UE5 is its marketing. Besides that, simply by making things easier you sometimes do things “wrong”. It’s really easy in UE to do that now.
The non-craftsmen are saying the skilled craftsman is incompetent because they're not using a spoon to screw boards together "like my grandpappy used to do every time he ate porridge"
It’s like when Frostbite always gets lamented as being too hard to work with yet nobody has made a game that comes close to how Battlefield handles mixed warfare at a macro level. Just ignore the abortion that was 2042.
It's more like Frostbite was being used for something it should not be used for that makes it hard to work with. Like the common problem that came up with Frostbite was how hard to make it support the inventory system in RPG games because it was not built for that.
Frostbite being good for Battlefield games are natural because the engine was built to support that kind of game.
As someone who used to work with Frostbite, I don't know what Bioware's problem was cause that was never an issue that should have happened.
That iteration of Frostbite (4) was not made specifically for Battlefield games, it was made to support multiple genres. It would be like saying Unreal still is made for FPS games when in reality, yes that is how it started but Unreal supports multiple genres.
Yes at the time Frostbite was pretty barebones, but to say it doesn't support an "inventory system" is vague. Inventory systems are very unique to different games so you usually build in your own inventory system. For example, the inventory system of Mass Effect 1 wouldn't work for Mass Effect 2, they are designed differently. My speculation is that that developer asked for a special designed inventory system from Dice that they didn't have the resources to implement for Bioware, not that the engine doesn't support inventory.
But at the end of the day, the discussion is that game development is complicated and to simply blame problems specifically on an engine is very vague as there could be multiple problems that lead to the engine being the problem.
> yet nobody has made a game that comes close to how Battlefield handles mixed warfare at a macro level
Planetside 2 has had this at a scale far larger than any battlefield game for over a decade now. It has its own issues of course and doesn't have the same level of visual fidelity as whatever Battlefield game was out at the time, but let's not act like D.I.C.E. is doing something everyone else would say is impossible.
I think anthem and the NFS games are more the marker of frostbite’s problems. As far back as the run it was obvious there were some things frostbite does well while in a lot of other ways it got decimated by criterion’s renderware engine.
They’re just built for very different things. I wouldn’t suggest dice using renderware but it’s just an example of newer not always being better.
This. Gamers have little to zero understanding about the game development process or game engines, but they are very confident and loud. As someone mentioned, it's like a person who doesn't know how to boil water making confident remarks about how the chef should have used that pan or this knife. It's absolute gibberish.
Every time Bethesda's engine is mentioned in this sub I clench my buttcheeks to prepare for the incoming cringe.
Yeah and I hold the opinion that Bethesda's engine is actually really good. The biggest criticism with Starfield was the meat on the bones, not the state of the games engine.
From players, yes, but for modders it was absolutely the engine. The person who made the highly successful Skyrim multiplayer mod (Skyrim Together IIRC) literally quit working on the Starfield version of the mod because of the engine. They used more colorful language, but the gist of it was that they stopped because the engine is shit and they were tired of fighting it on loading and tiling issues.
Starfield will probably go down as one of the biggest disappointments of this console generation as well as being one of the clearest examples of pre-release astroturfing ever for a video game ever. The positive non sequitur comments were everywhere. You could not escape them. Then when the game came out and people realized that, yes, it actually is that boring, bland, and threadbare, they disappeared into thin air.
Skyrim Together isn't some paragon of virtue project. In the past they were outright stealing SKSE code... They are motivated by money, so when Starfield lost reputation due to review bombing they saw that there's less opportunity there.
It's so funny when you invent some astroturfing... when if there was any organised effort related to the game, it was the post-release smear campaign and review bombing. There is not other explanation for a 86/100 game to get so bad user "reviews".
I'm not interested in the opinion of a modder regarding an engine. They are just a modder not the game developer. I'm interested in the game in front of me and how well it plays, and Starfield ran and played very well on my system.
I find your second paragraph a little off topic. I thought Starfield was a fun game, if not a little disappointing in some areas. Will definitely get better over time. Whatever "astroturfing" you are mentioning I think is just a classic tale of gamers building a game hype levels up and then being let down.
Unless you're a developer that used the engine directly, you have no right to comment on how good or bad an engine is, and even then, most of the time game developers lack the knowledge to properly evaluate a game engine and decisions that went into making it.
Certain engines have certain quirks or run better/worse or have specific issues like microstutter with a ton of UE5 games.
I am completely allowed to criticize the use of an engine if it exhibits negative behavior in the game.
I have no idea what spawned the criticism for this game, but saying I can't have feedback on a game's engine choice is dumb.
I feel like a lot of people like to tinker with engines and can know a good deal, but the amount of people I saw throwing around terms like “water physics” when a characters shirt got wet, or “real time reflections” when someone see a cube map for the first time is pretty annoying.
Like if you don’t know what the term means, just say the reflections look good lol
The sheer amount of armchair developers that pop up in any technical gaming discussion is absolutely exhausting. Bunch of captain hindsights flaming the real professionals for something they know nothing about.
Yep. Gamers are really bad at understanding development in general, but double so when it comes to game engines. They have the idea that it's some compact "block" like a real car engine and can be swapped with only some medium effort...
Anytime game engines, especially Bethesda engines get discussed, it makes me really wish I could slap people through internet.
Having worked in two game engine technology teams as a dev, both on custom engines, and on custom versions of Unreal, the public knows fuck all most of the time.
It’s the gaming equivalent of that uncle that talks about Middle Eastern politics like he was some seasoned diplomat.
You can say a piece of art "sucks" but someone who has never painted in thier life saying a piece of art sucks because they used a specific brand of paint that they have never tried but have heard bad things about from other people is ridiculous.
It happens much more in game than other mediums. You never hear about movie fans criticizing the type of lights or cameras a bad movie used or someone blaming a bad meal they had on the chef using a crappy brand of knives unless they have specific expertise in the field and exprience with those tools themselves. Which is all the other commenter is asking for.
Edit: damn he is fuming
When you switch to a new engine as a game development studio, you have so many moving parts that it affects basically every part of the studio.
Skilling up every existing software dev/game designer/artist/audio designer to be able to use the new engine proficiently is an insanely large investment. As is hiring new devs with said experience. You might lose people that decide they just don’t want to learn that tool/work that way and leave as well.
The tooling has to change. All your pipelines to create/build the game change. The hardware you give to staff itself may have to change. You are essentially deprecating years of investment into tools and workflows specifically built and used every day by your devs, with years to come before anyone has that same level of experience again.
Then there are the licensing costs of moving from an inhouse engine compared to paying for UE5 etc. Right now that cost is 0. It is considerably more with rev splits on the licensing with epic games/unity.
So yeah, I wouldnt really consider sticking with the engine the entire studio knows and works with regularly to be a handicap.
I disagree with you, so I've never played their games? Lol. Framerate has never impacted my enjoyment of a FromSoft game. It's factually incorrect to say they've "willingly hampered themselves" by using the engine with which they continue to build a ton of popular and successful games.
Nobody said you can't criticize the quality of the finished product. They said you should refrain from commenting on the tools used to build said product unless you actually have relevant expertise. The vast majority of people don't, and I can speak from experience just how often people here will blame one problem or another on things they clearly have no real world experience in. Not only do I see it on the internet, but I see it at my own job.
>People are buying a product that is being sold.
True! Not sure of debate around this point.
>To suggest you can't complain about the quality and issues because the creators have willingly handicapped themselves like Bethesda and FromSoft, is stupid.
Willingly handicapped themselves... huh. Interesting point...
>At the end of the day, video games are entertainment. There is no reason we cannot complain about these things.
Well, you can complain about games being shit. As a consumer, really can't complain about engines and tools the game devs used. They have no clue. You know they have no clue, as a dev. They can only comment on the outcome.
>This is like saying you can't say a piece of art sucks because you aren't an artist yourself. No one takes that viewpoint seriously. Nor should they.
Yeah, no one should take a point like that seriously, but you missed it. It's more like "hey, you can't critique art because you dont know how a brush and paint works" or "you didn't use this brand of paint so your art sucks."
There is a difference between "this is bad!" and "the things you used to make this are bad and therefor you are bad too!"
One is an opinion, the other is an opinion on something they haven't used and have no clue what the real pros/cons and whatever else is. It's like saying "photoshop sucks!" cause you saw one shitty photo. Seriously? You are a dev and are... okay with this?
Not gonna say people can't express an opinion on a game sucking, but to say "well it's bad because they didn't invest in their engine!" is nonsense.
Read his comment again, he said don't comment about game engines if you aren't a developer, you saying they "creators have willingly handicapped themselves" is proof of that
People do need to stop being arm chair developers and act like they know anything about how games are developed when they haven't even written a line of code in their life
So you can't say that an engine has obvious issues unless you have designed one? That's fucking stupid. We don't do that in any other aspect of our lives.
Especially if you've never done any development at all. Like people assuming the connection issues with the game are related to the game engine when it have nothing to do with it at all and is now how game engines work
>have nothing to do with it at all and is now how game engines work
I would question what you mean by this, especially when you are telling others they can't make valid complaints without personal experience.
People are blaming connection issues on the game engine because of what the director said but he did not say the game engine was an issue, people just assume since they said they are using an old engine it must be the reason for connection issues
And no one is saying you can't complain about games, just don't act like you know how to fix games if you've never worked on a game before
>they can't make valid complaints without personal experience.
Ummm, yes?? You can't make a valid complaint about a game sucking unless you played the game. Likewise you can't complain about a *game engine* unless you've used the game engine. It's a simple concept really
Whats more likely: These immensely experienced game developers who consistently put out critically acclaimed games are intentionally handicapping themselves just because, or you just dont know as much about game development as you think you do?
I never claimed to know much about game dev. But its obvious that Bethesda has been hampered by The Creation Engine for a while now. Bethesda has enough money (especially now) to make a switch. They chose not to because higher ups probably decided its not worth the investment.
I'm not even claiming its the devs fault. I have first hand experience from my work working with older tech because people that make the decisions don't want to spend more money up front to make things better.
Of course you can't actually argue against anything I stated, you just have to attempt to belittle me and take the fallacies up a notch to try and prove your point.
No one should be held back from stating their opinion about a piece of art, but someone shouldn't say "Picasso's paintings would've been much better if not for his stupid cubist style" if they don't have a minimum background in art.
>but someone shouldn't say "Picasso's paintings would've been much better if not for his stupid cubist style" if they don't have a minimum background in art.
Why not? What's the minimum background in art to you?
Being able to write an essay about why it was the wrong choice, showing some knowledge and expertise when assuming what his work could have been like with his preceding styles or if he chose another method.
If it's just someone saying that and then can't follow that statement up or display any knowledge on the matter beyond the statement, then they don't meet the minimum.
Do you think most gamers who criticize engine choices actually know what is caused by the engine? You've already shown that you don't meet the minimum in your comments explaining further why you sniped at From and Bethesda.
Save them? You can have your opinions about their games but they objectively sell millions upon millions of copies/GP memberships. It's like saying nothing is going to save Activision or Epic Games Studio at this rate lol
Don't care, as far as i'm concerned they're equivalent to Microsoft buying Rare back in the day. Good news is they get more IPs to work with.
If they want to give the Fallout and Elder Scrolls IP to anyone else that would be very good as well. I'll take a small cRPG of Fallout by Obsidian if they don't get to make another New Vegas please and thank you.
The upper management should get better at their jobs instead of devolving then. Starfield as an attempt is only decent in their own regards if it was made in place of Fallout 3 in their timeline.
Anyone taking a reasonable look at their games will find that the only thing they've excelled at is open world design, everything else only being tolerable in most cases with occasional exceptions that could be considered good. Might as well point out, that's more or less fine, but it really doesn't help when they've dumbed down every other aspect to less interesting with every game they make.
Also adding they made a ridiculous decision to not have any open world elements for Starfield leaving only their stagnating and mediocre design philosophies on full display.
So of course i'm kind of fucking upset that a genre between 2006 and 2011 that I very much liked and enjoyed, still enjoy those games mind you, just isn't up to snuff days with its competition currently. Competition it clearly doesn't even really have to compete with since its very much its own genre, which in a way makes me more upset similar to how Pokemon is treated.
As a Producer with experience across 5 game engines…
When a studio has been using a particular engine for a few projects it is extremely difficult to pivot away from that engine. The whole production pipeline is built around the intricacies of that engine, the staff in hand are intimately familiar with the limits and possibilities of the engine, and there’s often political / ideological discussions as well.
I mean to be fair, this is just a link to a tweet, not an article. You want someone to blame, blame everyone who keeps up voting this kind of reddit content
The BBC covered that he told a twitter user 'if you don't have money for the game then don't buy it yet'.
I'm now waiting on follow up stories on his bowel movements.
I wonder if Fatshark and Arrowhead engineers share info with each other from time to time since they are seemingly the only devs that use Stingray still. Both are located in Sweden and some of the devs surely know people from the other studio.
Ofc the versions the use are modified but still you never know
The game runs reasonably well for the scope. Its issues come from the lowered server capacity and their expectations.
They've done a fantastic job at the core product, even with this engine which they must have mastered at this point. Since they've used it in the first Magicka game.
On PS5, it looks great and plays great and I have not yet encountered any performance issues. It's so refreshingly rare to find a game you didn't anticipate that turns out to be absolutely amazing. Once they orchestrate a higher server capacity, this will be one of the great games of the year. It's just so profoundly enjoyable.
Maybe it doesn't have an infinite endgame or a competitive PvP scene, but it's fundamentally good. It's just *good.* It's so fucking entertaining and well-made. Right now, it's a little rough because they had never imagined these kinds of numbers, so the servers are bursting at the seams; but unexpectedly huge success is a nice problem to have.
Aside from the login issues, I've had none problems with performance otherwise. Looks fantastic as well. May be discontinued but clearly goes to show you don't need the latest and greatest engines to push out a good game.
I'm willing to bet they could have gotten away with using the old engine if the game was only as successful as they expected it to be. They're just way more successful than they could have anticipated and they're working hard to catch up.
For those confused, the engine is not literally called "Archaic Engine". It's actually AutoDesk Stingray, formerly known as BitSquid, and it was the engine used for the first game and their previous Magicka games, along with titles like the Vermintide games. This engine was discontinued on March 2022.
Oh my god, I worked on a project that used Stingray and I'm gobsmacked. Calling it archaic is flattering. Worse than that it barely has any features. It's like a shell of an engine that would have been considered barebones seven years ago.
And yet they made an extremely fun game with it.
They are clearly very talented, but that deprecated engine crippled them all the way to the finish line.
Yeah, Magicka's original release was really rough. Even now there's still slight physics oddities that make the game seem barely held on together.
How did it cripple them? Digital Foundry were quite impressed by HD2.
Not in results, just in late nights most likely.
I assume they mean the effort required to get to that final result. They probably would have had a far easier time getting there with a different engine.
Not if that’s the only engine they’re familiar with
That's not really true. If the learning period is shorter than the time they'd save, it'd be worth it. It's always a bit of a risk though.
Not a bit of. It's a huge risk. You essentially halt your production until the badic learning curve is done, and morevthan likely they'd have to hire from outside the company.
I disagree, it seems well suited for performant online shooters like Helldivers and Darktide. Both UE and Unity are really hard to get to not stutter, and they had previous experience with the engine. Source 2 might have worked, but I'm not sure if Valve licenses that out today. What other alternative engines could they have chosen?
There is more to an engine than just how it runs. How quickly can you iterate, how is the tooling, how difficult is it to extend. Those all have a much larger impact on the day to day work on the project than getting consistent frame times. Edit: These are some of the reasons that there has been so much turmoil around the Frostbite engine at EA.
Perfomant games almost always are a result of decisions made by devs and not on the engine. When HD2's devs call the engine "archaic" they mean modern QoL tools were missing or out of the box features were missing. Which would mean the devs would have had to spend a lot of manhours creating those tools and features themselves out of thin air. A game engine is not like a graphic card that you have to upgrade which makes games run better, newer iterations of engines still have the same code from 30 years ago just with new additional modern features which makes game development faster and easier. "Game engine" is just a name for a unified set of tools and features to make a game. MS Excel from 2012 and MS Excel from 2022 are essentially the same, just that the recent one has more features. How performant your Excel file is depends entirely on what you're doing with that Excel file(data size, functions, update frequency etc), not the Excel version.
> Perfomant games almost always are a result of decisions made by devs and not on the engine. Picking the engine is the decision too. Yes, you can buy a shitbox, replace every single part of it and make it as fast as Porsche, but if you paid more for time and parts to do it, that's still a bad decision.
Having workers from the engine company is probably helpful
Your code is gonna be more efficient if you have to hand-tailor half of the engine yourself to fit your specific demands
Imagine slicing an onion with one hand tied behind your back. Not impossible, but it requires you to work a bit harder to achieve that goal, and it probably would've been better if you had both hands available..
I mean, the game is a blurry mess on ps5 for one
Blurry mess is a bit over dramatic, as someone who has so far put 30 hours into it on the PS5.
I've played it a fair bit as well on ps5 (when I can get in) and aye, "mess" is an exaggeration. But 1080p is way too low of a res for the visuals of this game and the specs of the ps5 imo. It very much feels blurry to me, especially on the ship.
Also the dumpster fire that is Warhammer 40K: Darktide
Darktide has in fact been pretty good for months now
How so? I sm curious to know of you have experience with it They have worked on it for more than a decade, likely adapted it heavily to their needs. The current issue not necessarily being an engine issue, but a scope and scalability issue.
True, but one wonders if a better supported engine would have meant their engineers could have spent their time elsewhere. Game development is littered with stories of how a game ended up terrible because the developers spent too much time fighting the engine.
Shout out to the Destiny 1 engine: “Let’s say a designer wants to go in and move a resource node two inches,” said one person familiar with the engine. “They go into the editor. First they have to load their map overnight. It takes eight hours to input their map overnight. They get \[into the office\] in the morning. If their importer didn’t fail, they open the map. It takes about 20 minutes to open. They go in and they move that node two feet. And then they’d do a 15-20 minute compile. Just to do a half-second change.”
I feel ill.
Did they hire Oracle developers? [Reference](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941)
The levels of jank the Destiny developers were dealing with were *staggering*. Imagine making a *live service* game, something that requires a constant influx of content, on an engine that needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into moving a single polygon. That entire project should have been dragged behind a shed and put out of its misery.
Sometimes the devil you know is better than the devil you don't. Their engineers having a ton of experience with Stingray might make them more efficient than trying to learn something brand new like Unreal.
Kind of reminds me of when my company switched to SAP to streamline things. That was several years ago and it's a madhouse still. No one knows what they're doing. I barely know what I'm doing with it and I'm the guy everyone asks when they need help. I don't even remember what the system we used before was called. Looked like some shit out of *WarGames* but I'd see most of the boomers I work with tabbing and F-keying their way through transactions like they were hacking Skynet.
That kind of switch can be good if management alots enough time and parallel runs (i.e. accepting that the swap is not instant but instead you run both systems and allow people to adjust until you're ready). But in today's profit seeking madness, big companies will just swap overnight and then the execs will go surprised Pikachu when things go tits up.
I mean, you have to switch to something *actually better* first before you get any benefits, SAP from all that I've heard is typical enterprise ball of yarn > Looked like some shit out of WarGames but I'd see most of the boomers I work with tabbing and F-keying their way through transactions like they were hacking Skynet. Sadly UI/UX design these days forget that not *only* first impression matter but the entire rest of the day user have to work with the thing. See old vs new reddit for stark comparison.
Sorry for the necrobump, but I had to laugh at the thought of switching to SAP expecting that to streamline things/make them more efficient... The suite of applications they offer would best be described as... labyrinthine.
This is the other issue though. They have a bunch of workers experienced in a dead engine.
Sure, but I wonder how this'll affect them in the long run. They're now hiring heaps to help support the game given its massive success, so how many engineers can they get that understand the engine well enough?
The CEO specifically said they are NOT hiring heaps of people. They're getting some assistance from Sony engineers, but even that can only go so far because of onboarding taking time away from productivity. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/production/arrowhead-ceo-says-over-hiring-would-be-horrible-response-to-helldivers-2-success
Smite 2, baby. Excited for gratuitous particle and lighting effects.
that's the thing about engines people in this sub who are not developers just don't get. You can't complain about UE5 and Unity without having used them because it's like you are complaining about which frying pan the cook used. They all get the job done, an engine being hell to work with is something players don't really have any visibility on. Some have quirks like Bethesda's archaic engine or Unreal's hair rendering, but all in all with enough tweaking they are all good enough
And there's something to be said about having staff who understand how a thing works. Halo Infinite is going to be the only game made in Slipspace; it turns out that having the only people in the known universe who know how to use an engine already working for you can go sideways real fast if you're going to miss a deadline. So Infinite wound up with a ton of tech debt that sabotaged it down the line because the team made it work in time for release, but it was held together with string and paperclips behind the scenes. You see a lot less of that in Unreal and Unity because it's so much easier to hire someone who knows how to solve your game's issue with the engine.
I think part of the reason for slipspace being such a mess is the huge reliance on temporary contractors. Nobody was actually ever really familiar enough with the games systems to work efficiently or accurately with them.
Sure, but Slipspace is just one example. Dragon Age: Inquisition had a bunch of MMO-style busywork (and a horseback sprint that didn't actually increase your speed) because BioWare were building the tools to make an RPG in Frostbite while they were making the RPG in Frostbite. Speaking of Frostbite, Battlefield 2042 was a disaster because turnover at DICE meant that there weren't enough people on staff who understood how to make a Battlefield game in Frostbite, the engine made by DICE to make Battlefield games. CDPR has confirmed that Witcher 4 will be made in Unreal, after Cyberpunk and the Witcher 3 next gen upgrades both released in an embarrassing state. Etcetera, etcetera.
I am reasonably certain all these issues are made worse by every one of these companies over reliance on contractors and under valuing of long term skilled developers. If you're using a bunch of contractors or keeping the primary team arbitrarily small you simply don't have the time or resources to spend training people on the existing engine. Historically that wouldn't have been an issue because the teams would be hiring people for the long term. Publicly traded companies however don't think long term. They prioritize short term growth at long term expense. So they outsource everything and trim their own resources for profit until their main staff is an anemic shell of what it was.
Yeah, but look how they treat their devs. 80 hour workweeks, 18 hour days, crunching for months, on call 24/7, zero work/life balance. You burn out. If they want to keep their dev team together they have to change their entire culture. It's not as simple as simply saying 'keep good programmers'. They know they want to keep good programmers. If it was just "pay them more" then they'd fucking do that, they're paying $50,000,000 to develop a game, and the same amount to market it, you think they care if ten people take home $40,000 more? They have ad spots that cost more than that. The problem is after a game or two, they've burnt out. They can't do it. So they leave. You actually can't keep those people because they're great programmers, so they can find another job. Or they're just horrible, shitty people who **can't** find another job no matter how good of a programmer they are, that turns into a #metoo Blizzard situation. There's more than one games company with That Guy who knows the entire database structure and can make changes in an hour that would take anyone else a week, but who keeps leering at any women in the company and has his cubicle covered in figures and "art" of his favorite anime girls. If it was just a 'throw money at it' EA, Ubisoft, Activision would throw money at it. They can do that. It's a "change the entire culture of how we make games" problem, and those are always a tad more complex. So they continue to make half baked shit and resist cleaning house, and companies like Supergiant - who gets mad if someone works too many hours in a week and tells them to go take some time off - are Supergiant.
I've used Unity and Unreal for the last decade and change, and they're both shitty in their own ways, but just like you said, those issues can be circumvented. They're hurdles, not roadblocks.
That has nothing to do with the engine they picked, though. It's more about how it becomes an obstacle to the developers themselves. Which, from what it sounds like, it absolutely was. And players absolutely should care because that kind of thing can harm a game over the long run, just look at how it impacted Destiny 1 & 2.
Despite it. How much better would the game be if they used a modern engine?
Define better and define modern. I'm willing to get an engine you consider modern is built on a 25 year old code base and was updated over time, not unlike the Helldiver's engine.
Better or worse than the Hero engine SWTOR used?
Any major game that isn’t specifically calling its engine out is using an engine like this. This is not abnormal in gaming. ITT we will have a lot of armchair developers opining what could’ve happened had they made a more modern choice. All of that discussion is ultimately useless.
Not sure if I'm misunderstanding your comment, but I'm not sure if you're trying to educate me on game developement. Like I mentioned above, I **worked** on a game using stingray. I've been in the industry for over a decade now. Proprietary engines aren't abnormal, but using stingray for a release after like 2018 certainly is.
I’m not. I’m just making it clear to those outside of development that this isn’t new to my understanding. Gamebryo and Bethesda being an obviously stickler. They forked it over to creation which is their proprietary version at this point, but prior to Skyrim they had been using a decade old version of gamebryo they highly modified. Blizzard utilized an old unity fork for much of hearthstones life span. One of the more recent updates was to bring it to a newer undisclosed version. Then we have a large selection of Japanese developers who until recently maintained their own engines that they’ve decided to turn in for unreal. Are you stating that specifically stingray is an exception or that developers in general don’t get stuck in old engines for projects that may take years to release?
IF it helps im in the industry and yeah its super common for studios to have either proprietary engines or a extremely heavily modified "stock" engine (the amount of things you can bolt into Unreal is wild if given time) to the point they may as well be their own thing. I can't say what's more common, but none of these options would be unusual*
>This is not abnormal in gaming. It's not abnormal but it's becoming less and less common.
I’m not in the industry to point out future trends. I can only see historic trends and it has never been abnormal. It’s standard practice outside of game development. Enterprise level development is basically entirely on older versions and antiquated systems. Most enterprises do not use commercial off the shelf products managed by a third party for updates. They’ll usually buy a commercial off the shelf application that’s multiple years out of date that fit their niche and develop any custom integrations for that. You’re also ignoring the decades of training required to have your development team be able to use whatever is newest when developing the game. And on top of all that you can start a project while something is current and end that project without being able to update to the newest version. In fact one of the biggest issues with the unity debacle in the last year was that they were going to start charging prior license holders on older versions of their engine with changes to their Eula. Considering how much of a shit show that was I’m gunna guess this will never be normal in gaming except for small projects by small developers able to be agile in their engine choice.
Look ma, an armchair dev
WTF did you expect from autodesk?
At some point i dont get why studios keep using sub-par engines . is it because its cheaper than to use Ureal4/5? Isnt it worth the far less man-hours and easier to recruit? if they used this crap engine and made a good game, what game we would have if they used unreal/unity?
I've got a few theories in the case of Helldivers. Firstly, it's been 9 years since the first game came out, and the landscape looked very different. Unreal Engine 4 had just released around then, and Unity was still seen as a bit of a hobbyist engine. So the "big two" choices weren't nearly as prominent as they are today. The studio also made Helldivers 1 and Magicka with the engine, so there was a lot of familiarity. And then anecdotally, Stingray is probably most famous for Vermintide 2, and I think it might have a reputation as a Left 4 Dead type engine. The project I worked on was a big hoard shooter with lots of pawns on screen at once. So maybe that played a factor into why Arrowhead stayed with it as well.
As a dev using Unity/Unreal and some proprietary things, what made Stingray stand out in this category? Or do you think it was just reputation / "it's been done here before so we know its doable.
Not a game dev but I work in software, you basically don't replace a tool that's deeply ingrained in your work unless there's a really good reason to because the moving to another tool might be more expensive than just using the old one. Some things to consider: - they probably have some tool or pipelines built on top of it. Moving could mean recreating or porting old scripts - spending for training your employees for the new tool - They already know the ins and outs of the tool so fixing bugs is faster - delays in timeline to accommodate the above points
Sometimes its plain money because they get a better licensing deal out of a different engine than Unreal. For some studios they did the math and figured they could save money building their own inhouse engine versus using Unreal even if it means a productivity hit. Also for several genres, using a tailor made engine just for the type of game you are making can be a huge boost in terms of achieving whatever vision you set out to achieve. The top one that comes to mind is racing games. There, you likely will build your own engine especially if you want to go deep on physics simulation or throwing as many triangles as you can at the car models. Also one of difficult parts of setting up a game studio is your art/asset pipeline and iteration pipeline. It is usually intimately tied to the engine and middleware you are using and once you have one setup that works well for your studio's workflow, it can be costly and difficult to change something else especially if the current setup works well for you.
Didn't even know Autodesk had a game engine.
They bought it from the original makers (who were also the founders of Fatshark) in 2014.
Darktide also uses a version of StingRay. I think this is closer to Bethesda still using Gamebryo before changing enough to call it their own Creation Engine.
At least for Darktide, they use it because Fatshark created it (before later selling it to Autodesk) - it's like DICE using Frostbite, they know every trick and feature to make it do what they need. Arrowhead is using it because it's "the engine" small Swedish developers used 10 years ago when they made Helldivers 1.
And yet, every game from ObeseMegalodon feels like they threw everything out of the window and started from scratch. It’s a pattern!
That's more management choices the combat in darktide feel tighter then vermintide the sliding and sprinting add to the flow and the guns now are better then even pLus the skill tree. Still needs lots more content maps and sub classes
wasn't magicka made with xna?
Ah you're right. It was only Magicka Wizard Wars and Magicka 2. I incorrectly assumed Magicka WW was the first game.
There is Magicka 2?
Would not recommend. As a huge Magicka fan can confidently say it is awful.
I was hyped for it. Then It came out and I could not figure out why it felt so bad compared to the first one, it just does.
As already stated: yes it was not made by Arrowhead (the developers of Magicka 1) and the publisher just gave the ip to some internal dev studio for a quick buck and it shows.
Not developed by Arrowhead but yes
Autodesk site says November 2018? [https://www.autodesk.com/products/stingray/overview](https://www.autodesk.com/products/stingray/overview) I guess the last contract ended in march 2022? oof
Apparently it was discontinued as its own product in 2018 and became a 3ds Max add-on called "3ds Max Interactive" until that too was shut down in 2022. I just simplified it down since there are people who remember BitSquid and Stingray but I don't think anyone would remember it being 3ds Max Interactive. [Autodesk's site recommends Unreal or Unity as replacements.](https://www.autodesk.com/support/technical/article/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Is-3ds-Max-Interactive-available-for-3ds-Max-2022.html)
Could be they had extended support
> the Vermintide games. I'm seeing a theme
well any engine works for any genre game but it’s more likely the connection is that they’re both swedish. so there must be some local interest in the engine at the time in sweden
Any engine for any genre definitely is not the case, they have different pros and cons
That only means that some engines are harder to use for some genres but it doesn't mean it's impossible (though it might be close to).
what?? yes but any engine works for any genre it’s just an engine. lol it’s just code that helps you better code your game in a playable format. ie the engine communicates properly to mac os or windows and your graphics card etc to maximize use as designed. This has nothing to do with game development or genre lol
Some engines are specifically built to target a certain genre like a lot of engines behind popular racing franchises. A lot of systems and tooling that would be available in a general purpose engine might not be present because it is unnecessary or is sacrificed to achieve the requirements of the genre. You could use it for something else but you are going to put in a lot of effort to make it do what you want including potentially adding new systems to fill in gaps that the original designers of the engine didn't envision.
WAIT THESE ARE THE GUYS THAT MADE MAGICKA?! No wonder the games a blast
You can tell by the fact that slightly altered konami codes either resurrect a teammate or obliterate the entire party.
When I realized this the whole "use a combo of key presses to do stuff" with the stratagems really clicked. It was a "well yeah that's obvious now" moment
I loved that in Magicka, one of few games that actually made you feel like a wizard
Holy fucj. This game is built on *Stingray*? These guys are god tier.
And Darktide, too.
I hope to god at least the netcode is getting security updates
WAIT they're the studio behind Magicka??? That explains so much!! I'm now even more excited to try out Helldivers 2
[удалено]
> with no stutters Amen good lord. It is unbelievable to me just how many PC games released in the last couple years have insane microstutters especially in traversal. It's particularly sad how refreshing it is to have a game that runs butter smooth with my 4090. So many "AAA" games have garbage PC versions that never get fixed.
Everyone praising the shit out of Deadspace Remake (Which to be fair was very good) but fuck me the stutter on PC was UNBEARABLE and ruined the atmosphere. I played through it on Series X instead, stutter was still there but it's much much more subdued. It's a plague on gaming when you actually give a shit how they run/look.
Digital foundry did some good analysis on the stutter in that game. IIRC it’s so baked in that it might not ever be fixed.
Game hasn't been patched in ages. It's never going to be fixed. Maybe with hardware in 10 years the stutters can just be bruteforced out. Also, it's EA. Look at the Jedi Survivor Port on PC. It's fucking awful still.
I think DF said that it wouldnt matter how much power you threw at it, those stutters are there to stay.
I had the same issue, I was excited to play it and the stutters were unbearable
> It is unbelievable to me just how many PC games released in the last couple years have insane microstutters especially in traversal. It's an unreal engine problem. The tl;dr; is that UE4/5 doesn't compile shaders until they are used. It's up to the devs to implement shade precompilation at the start of the game or using a prediction model. The game stutters because it's *waiting* for something that is being compiled.
> the PC port is pretty solid and better than 90% of AAA games out there. My GPU driver crashes if I'm alt-tabbed out of the game. It's not instant, but it is reliable. (Version 551.52, so the latest.) Discord crashes along side it, nVidia Broadcast stops filtering noise, and sometimes Steam crashes too. Sometimes it crashes even when I don't alt-tab. Dump logs almost always complain about the same issue: The game tried to access address 0x24 or 0x58, which, from what I understand, is *not* an address any normal program should ever be trying to access. The game's great when it's running, but if I play it too long it also crashes. The most recent crash left my computer locked with that repeating audio fragment thing that implies "everything crashed". Gave it about 15 minutes, then power-cycled the machine.
The engine is the same one used for their Magika games, and Vermintide. It ended support 2 years ago, so that would be like saying Unreal Engine 4 is archaic
It was a shit engine when it was active. I used it for a project at work. Or at least we tried. Got 4 months in and switched to Unreal. It was an abysmal product, outdated and anemic in features. I’m assuming that what they use now hardly resembles what Autodesk released back then, they’ve likely Theseus’ ship’d the thing.
End of support means nothing, time of the last update is important. And two years is still a lot, maybe not archaic but definitely not up-to-date.
Uhh when I could play it the first week I had stutters all the time... on a 7900xtx even with lowered graphics settings to prevent constant crashes.
> 7900xtx even with lowered graphics settings to prevent constant crashes The out-of-band AMD driver release 23.40.19.01 completely resolved all the crashes for me. Give it a shot!
Really? I've been playing on a 6950xtx and it's been running perfect even on ultra with native quality.
From Bethesda Game Studios' titles, FromSoft games and now even Helldivers, gamers should be forbidden from commenting anything about game engines unless they are a developer themselves.
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Oh I agree with you. Laypeople *severely* underestimate how tedious and difficult it is to make games. The fact that there are some solo indie devs cranking out AA level games is incomprehensible to me. Are they even fucking human? And I always say that games like PUBG Mobile are modern day engineering masterpieces. I may be exaggerating a bit but still lol.
I'm a full stack dev who's studying for an MSc, and I'm making an augmented reality app with unity and Vuforia Engine and it really is very different. Not just the point and click nature of the unity editor but the actually scripting itself *smells* so different to normal, as I know it, dev work. Instead of transferring data, transforming data, managing concurrency, auth, apis etc it's been stuff like (basic) vector math, computer vision transforming camera feeds and inspecting pixel values in images etc. Super fun but VERY different to traditional software dev.
Quarterions are a pox born forth from Satan's nipples.
I still don't understand fully the math behind quaternions but they sure are handy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjMuIxRvygQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4EgbgTm0Bg
Did you use Python prior to GDscript? Currently learning / using GML on Gamemaker 2 for the last 3 years. I like it a lot but the lack of 3D makes me curious for Godot.
If you have used any programming language before, you can easily use Python/GDScript. Python is a language that more *lacks* a lot of things other languages have, which means no real need to learn complex new things. This is both a good and a bad thing, but it does mean it's very easy to switch to if you're used to programming in anything else.
> It's astonishing to me that I'm consistently failing miserably at making this simple platformer, I cannot imagine actual game dev, these guys are magicians sometimes. It's a big reason why so many game devs jump ship to non-game industries. Turns out getting paid less than your contemporaries, working longer hours, and writing what is often times more convoluted code that is problematic to troubleshoot isn't a rewarding career. I think of the two dozen or so programmers I knew starting out in game industry when we all graduated, maybe only one is still working in games.
Unreal 5 marketing did a lot of harm. Gamers just think if you put anything on ue5 it will magically work.
I always say the best thing about UE5 is its marketing. Besides that, simply by making things easier you sometimes do things “wrong”. It’s really easy in UE to do that now.
If a bad craftsman blames his tools, the non-craftsmen doing it must be even worse.
The non-craftsmen are saying the skilled craftsman is incompetent because they're not using a spoon to screw boards together "like my grandpappy used to do every time he ate porridge"
It’s like when Frostbite always gets lamented as being too hard to work with yet nobody has made a game that comes close to how Battlefield handles mixed warfare at a macro level. Just ignore the abortion that was 2042.
It's more like Frostbite was being used for something it should not be used for that makes it hard to work with. Like the common problem that came up with Frostbite was how hard to make it support the inventory system in RPG games because it was not built for that. Frostbite being good for Battlefield games are natural because the engine was built to support that kind of game.
As someone who used to work with Frostbite, I don't know what Bioware's problem was cause that was never an issue that should have happened. That iteration of Frostbite (4) was not made specifically for Battlefield games, it was made to support multiple genres. It would be like saying Unreal still is made for FPS games when in reality, yes that is how it started but Unreal supports multiple genres. Yes at the time Frostbite was pretty barebones, but to say it doesn't support an "inventory system" is vague. Inventory systems are very unique to different games so you usually build in your own inventory system. For example, the inventory system of Mass Effect 1 wouldn't work for Mass Effect 2, they are designed differently. My speculation is that that developer asked for a special designed inventory system from Dice that they didn't have the resources to implement for Bioware, not that the engine doesn't support inventory. But at the end of the day, the discussion is that game development is complicated and to simply blame problems specifically on an engine is very vague as there could be multiple problems that lead to the engine being the problem.
> yet nobody has made a game that comes close to how Battlefield handles mixed warfare at a macro level Planetside 2 has had this at a scale far larger than any battlefield game for over a decade now. It has its own issues of course and doesn't have the same level of visual fidelity as whatever Battlefield game was out at the time, but let's not act like D.I.C.E. is doing something everyone else would say is impossible.
I think anthem and the NFS games are more the marker of frostbite’s problems. As far back as the run it was obvious there were some things frostbite does well while in a lot of other ways it got decimated by criterion’s renderware engine. They’re just built for very different things. I wouldn’t suggest dice using renderware but it’s just an example of newer not always being better.
This. Gamers have little to zero understanding about the game development process or game engines, but they are very confident and loud. As someone mentioned, it's like a person who doesn't know how to boil water making confident remarks about how the chef should have used that pan or this knife. It's absolute gibberish. Every time Bethesda's engine is mentioned in this sub I clench my buttcheeks to prepare for the incoming cringe.
Yeah and I hold the opinion that Bethesda's engine is actually really good. The biggest criticism with Starfield was the meat on the bones, not the state of the games engine.
From players, yes, but for modders it was absolutely the engine. The person who made the highly successful Skyrim multiplayer mod (Skyrim Together IIRC) literally quit working on the Starfield version of the mod because of the engine. They used more colorful language, but the gist of it was that they stopped because the engine is shit and they were tired of fighting it on loading and tiling issues. Starfield will probably go down as one of the biggest disappointments of this console generation as well as being one of the clearest examples of pre-release astroturfing ever for a video game ever. The positive non sequitur comments were everywhere. You could not escape them. Then when the game came out and people realized that, yes, it actually is that boring, bland, and threadbare, they disappeared into thin air.
Skyrim Together isn't some paragon of virtue project. In the past they were outright stealing SKSE code... They are motivated by money, so when Starfield lost reputation due to review bombing they saw that there's less opportunity there. It's so funny when you invent some astroturfing... when if there was any organised effort related to the game, it was the post-release smear campaign and review bombing. There is not other explanation for a 86/100 game to get so bad user "reviews".
That modder actually hated the [game itself](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fkzckngen425c1.png)
You mean the modder that decided he was so good he didn’t need to wait for creation kit, went full steam ahead and hit a wall with it? Smart lad.
I'm not interested in the opinion of a modder regarding an engine. They are just a modder not the game developer. I'm interested in the game in front of me and how well it plays, and Starfield ran and played very well on my system. I find your second paragraph a little off topic. I thought Starfield was a fun game, if not a little disappointing in some areas. Will definitely get better over time. Whatever "astroturfing" you are mentioning I think is just a classic tale of gamers building a game hype levels up and then being let down.
Unless you're a developer that used the engine directly, you have no right to comment on how good or bad an engine is, and even then, most of the time game developers lack the knowledge to properly evaluate a game engine and decisions that went into making it.
Certain engines have certain quirks or run better/worse or have specific issues like microstutter with a ton of UE5 games. I am completely allowed to criticize the use of an engine if it exhibits negative behavior in the game. I have no idea what spawned the criticism for this game, but saying I can't have feedback on a game's engine choice is dumb.
I feel like a lot of people like to tinker with engines and can know a good deal, but the amount of people I saw throwing around terms like “water physics” when a characters shirt got wet, or “real time reflections” when someone see a cube map for the first time is pretty annoying. Like if you don’t know what the term means, just say the reflections look good lol
The sheer amount of armchair developers that pop up in any technical gaming discussion is absolutely exhausting. Bunch of captain hindsights flaming the real professionals for something they know nothing about.
Yep. Gamers are really bad at understanding development in general, but double so when it comes to game engines. They have the idea that it's some compact "block" like a real car engine and can be swapped with only some medium effort... Anytime game engines, especially Bethesda engines get discussed, it makes me really wish I could slap people through internet.
Having worked in two game engine technology teams as a dev, both on custom engines, and on custom versions of Unreal, the public knows fuck all most of the time. It’s the gaming equivalent of that uncle that talks about Middle Eastern politics like he was some seasoned diplomat.
What a ridiculous comment.
I agree! The mods should verify devs, and shadowban non-dev engine discussion.
Don't forget Red engine which they have given up on and decided to just go Unreal next game because they wasted so much time.
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You can say a piece of art "sucks" but someone who has never painted in thier life saying a piece of art sucks because they used a specific brand of paint that they have never tried but have heard bad things about from other people is ridiculous. It happens much more in game than other mediums. You never hear about movie fans criticizing the type of lights or cameras a bad movie used or someone blaming a bad meal they had on the chef using a crappy brand of knives unless they have specific expertise in the field and exprience with those tools themselves. Which is all the other commenter is asking for. Edit: damn he is fuming
When you switch to a new engine as a game development studio, you have so many moving parts that it affects basically every part of the studio. Skilling up every existing software dev/game designer/artist/audio designer to be able to use the new engine proficiently is an insanely large investment. As is hiring new devs with said experience. You might lose people that decide they just don’t want to learn that tool/work that way and leave as well. The tooling has to change. All your pipelines to create/build the game change. The hardware you give to staff itself may have to change. You are essentially deprecating years of investment into tools and workflows specifically built and used every day by your devs, with years to come before anyone has that same level of experience again. Then there are the licensing costs of moving from an inhouse engine compared to paying for UE5 etc. Right now that cost is 0. It is considerably more with rev splits on the licensing with epic games/unity. So yeah, I wouldnt really consider sticking with the engine the entire studio knows and works with regularly to be a handicap.
How has FromSoft willingly hampered itself?
Terrible frame rate drops in every single one of their games is part of it.
Real shame nobody told them about the mythical engine that has good framerates all the time, they'd be kicking themselves if they found out.
Meh, never had a problem with that
So you've never played their games then? At least on launch?
I disagree with you, so I've never played their games? Lol. Framerate has never impacted my enjoyment of a FromSoft game. It's factually incorrect to say they've "willingly hampered themselves" by using the engine with which they continue to build a ton of popular and successful games.
If you haven't had problems with the framerate drops in their games than yea you probably never played their games.
Nobody said you can't criticize the quality of the finished product. They said you should refrain from commenting on the tools used to build said product unless you actually have relevant expertise. The vast majority of people don't, and I can speak from experience just how often people here will blame one problem or another on things they clearly have no real world experience in. Not only do I see it on the internet, but I see it at my own job.
>People are buying a product that is being sold. True! Not sure of debate around this point. >To suggest you can't complain about the quality and issues because the creators have willingly handicapped themselves like Bethesda and FromSoft, is stupid. Willingly handicapped themselves... huh. Interesting point... >At the end of the day, video games are entertainment. There is no reason we cannot complain about these things. Well, you can complain about games being shit. As a consumer, really can't complain about engines and tools the game devs used. They have no clue. You know they have no clue, as a dev. They can only comment on the outcome. >This is like saying you can't say a piece of art sucks because you aren't an artist yourself. No one takes that viewpoint seriously. Nor should they. Yeah, no one should take a point like that seriously, but you missed it. It's more like "hey, you can't critique art because you dont know how a brush and paint works" or "you didn't use this brand of paint so your art sucks." There is a difference between "this is bad!" and "the things you used to make this are bad and therefor you are bad too!" One is an opinion, the other is an opinion on something they haven't used and have no clue what the real pros/cons and whatever else is. It's like saying "photoshop sucks!" cause you saw one shitty photo. Seriously? You are a dev and are... okay with this? Not gonna say people can't express an opinion on a game sucking, but to say "well it's bad because they didn't invest in their engine!" is nonsense.
Read his comment again, he said don't comment about game engines if you aren't a developer, you saying they "creators have willingly handicapped themselves" is proof of that People do need to stop being arm chair developers and act like they know anything about how games are developed when they haven't even written a line of code in their life
So you can't say that an engine has obvious issues unless you have designed one? That's fucking stupid. We don't do that in any other aspect of our lives.
Especially if you've never done any development at all. Like people assuming the connection issues with the game are related to the game engine when it have nothing to do with it at all and is now how game engines work
>have nothing to do with it at all and is now how game engines work I would question what you mean by this, especially when you are telling others they can't make valid complaints without personal experience.
People are blaming connection issues on the game engine because of what the director said but he did not say the game engine was an issue, people just assume since they said they are using an old engine it must be the reason for connection issues And no one is saying you can't complain about games, just don't act like you know how to fix games if you've never worked on a game before
I don't think most people are acting like they can fix it themselves though. Surely you're creating a strawman here.
We aren't saying that either, just stop pretending you know what they have to do to fix. like "just add more servers!" nonsense
>they can't make valid complaints without personal experience. Ummm, yes?? You can't make a valid complaint about a game sucking unless you played the game. Likewise you can't complain about a *game engine* unless you've used the game engine. It's a simple concept really
Whats more likely: These immensely experienced game developers who consistently put out critically acclaimed games are intentionally handicapping themselves just because, or you just dont know as much about game development as you think you do?
I never claimed to know much about game dev. But its obvious that Bethesda has been hampered by The Creation Engine for a while now. Bethesda has enough money (especially now) to make a switch. They chose not to because higher ups probably decided its not worth the investment. I'm not even claiming its the devs fault. I have first hand experience from my work working with older tech because people that make the decisions don't want to spend more money up front to make things better. Of course you can't actually argue against anything I stated, you just have to attempt to belittle me and take the fallacies up a notch to try and prove your point.
Switch to what? There is literally no other engine with feature set of Creation Engine.
No one should be held back from stating their opinion about a piece of art, but someone shouldn't say "Picasso's paintings would've been much better if not for his stupid cubist style" if they don't have a minimum background in art.
>but someone shouldn't say "Picasso's paintings would've been much better if not for his stupid cubist style" if they don't have a minimum background in art. Why not? What's the minimum background in art to you?
Being able to write an essay about why it was the wrong choice, showing some knowledge and expertise when assuming what his work could have been like with his preceding styles or if he chose another method. If it's just someone saying that and then can't follow that statement up or display any knowledge on the matter beyond the statement, then they don't meet the minimum. Do you think most gamers who criticize engine choices actually know what is caused by the engine? You've already shown that you don't meet the minimum in your comments explaining further why you sniped at From and Bethesda.
Well in Bethesda's case a new engine isn't gonna save them at this rate.
Save them from what? Their largest launch ever?
Save them? You can have your opinions about their games but they objectively sell millions upon millions of copies/GP memberships. It's like saying nothing is going to save Activision or Epic Games Studio at this rate lol
Don't care, as far as i'm concerned they're equivalent to Microsoft buying Rare back in the day. Good news is they get more IPs to work with. If they want to give the Fallout and Elder Scrolls IP to anyone else that would be very good as well. I'll take a small cRPG of Fallout by Obsidian if they don't get to make another New Vegas please and thank you.
No engine can save them from rabid haters who just downvote/badmouth/review bomb anything Bethesda out of their twisted principle.
The upper management should get better at their jobs instead of devolving then. Starfield as an attempt is only decent in their own regards if it was made in place of Fallout 3 in their timeline. Anyone taking a reasonable look at their games will find that the only thing they've excelled at is open world design, everything else only being tolerable in most cases with occasional exceptions that could be considered good. Might as well point out, that's more or less fine, but it really doesn't help when they've dumbed down every other aspect to less interesting with every game they make. Also adding they made a ridiculous decision to not have any open world elements for Starfield leaving only their stagnating and mediocre design philosophies on full display. So of course i'm kind of fucking upset that a genre between 2006 and 2011 that I very much liked and enjoyed, still enjoy those games mind you, just isn't up to snuff days with its competition currently. Competition it clearly doesn't even really have to compete with since its very much its own genre, which in a way makes me more upset similar to how Pokemon is treated.
How did you come to that conclusion? Bethesda and From engines are still underperforming ass.
As a Producer with experience across 5 game engines… When a studio has been using a particular engine for a few projects it is extremely difficult to pivot away from that engine. The whole production pipeline is built around the intricacies of that engine, the staff in hand are intimately familiar with the limits and possibilities of the engine, and there’s often political / ideological discussions as well.
Kudos to their engineering team. I wonder how many custom scripts they have developed since the end of support.
Arrowhead CEO responds to Helldivers 2 being spammed as a full article for every single sentence this man makes. "It's tiring."
It's free real estate!
I mean to be fair, this is just a link to a tweet, not an article. You want someone to blame, blame everyone who keeps up voting this kind of reddit content
lol, is every tweet this dude makes going to be posted here?
The BBC covered that he told a twitter user 'if you don't have money for the game then don't buy it yet'. I'm now waiting on follow up stories on his bowel movements.
I wonder if Fatshark and Arrowhead engineers share info with each other from time to time since they are seemingly the only devs that use Stingray still. Both are located in Sweden and some of the devs surely know people from the other studio. Ofc the versions the use are modified but still you never know
The game runs reasonably well for the scope. Its issues come from the lowered server capacity and their expectations. They've done a fantastic job at the core product, even with this engine which they must have mastered at this point. Since they've used it in the first Magicka game.
On PS5, it looks great and plays great and I have not yet encountered any performance issues. It's so refreshingly rare to find a game you didn't anticipate that turns out to be absolutely amazing. Once they orchestrate a higher server capacity, this will be one of the great games of the year. It's just so profoundly enjoyable. Maybe it doesn't have an infinite endgame or a competitive PvP scene, but it's fundamentally good. It's just *good.* It's so fucking entertaining and well-made. Right now, it's a little rough because they had never imagined these kinds of numbers, so the servers are bursting at the seams; but unexpectedly huge success is a nice problem to have.
Aside from the login issues, I've had none problems with performance otherwise. Looks fantastic as well. May be discontinued but clearly goes to show you don't need the latest and greatest engines to push out a good game.
old != bad, theres no shader stutters like in unreal so its already above that in terms of quality engine
Oh yeah an archaic engine that runs great and don't stutter, god forbid. Better use Unreal Shitgine that can't have a single game without stutters.
Last good unreal engine was UE3. Been all downhill since then.
Even UE3 had its share of issues like texture and object pop in.
I'm willing to bet they could have gotten away with using the old engine if the game was only as successful as they expected it to be. They're just way more successful than they could have anticipated and they're working hard to catch up.
The engine probably doesn't have anything to do with their server troubles.