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this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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I don't think you'd ever want an engine level monopoly to that degree, even Unreal isn't by itself capable of the systems that allow Starfield to work the way it does, and would require serious modifications to do so, and not every studio would perform those modifications necessary to complete their game's vision, and then just give all of that to everyone else to piggyback off of for free, there are a lot of reasons to not do that, specifically, what Unity is doing now.
It only seems cool to do that with Unreal because they haven't pulled anything like Unity... yet. Not having done that yet doesn't preclude them from doing it, that's the scary thing about the Unity debacle, anyone engine could turn around and make a horrible change, we just have to trust that they won't, and being given monopoly power makes it too tempting to trust forever.
Can you back that up? Nothing I've seen of Starfield indicates it couldn't be done in UE.
Please check out Angels Fall First and Renegade X, they're made with Unreal Engine 3 and are not AAA titles, so they can give you a glimpse of what even older versions of UE can do.
I'm talking about the Creation/Gamebryo specific sets of mechanics like NPC schedules and the radiant AI or quest systems, those specific things that needed to be created that aren't inherent in the engine. Not that Starfield is really the best show for those anymore, not by a long shot, it's more of just an example of a limitation of OP's idea of all devs using one engine.
Developers could all use Unreal, but if someone wanted to make Oblivion on Unreal they'd have to program and create those systems and mechanics because they don't just "come with the engine". If they made those, and all devs use Unreal, should they be folded into Unreal for future devs to use? Should Unreal program those mechanics or something similar for future devs to use? At what point does it become too complex to bolt on certain systems to an existing engine instead of make one explicitly for it, depending on the type of game?
I don't have a great example for a game so novel in its execution that it would be truly limited by Unreal, because that engine is absolutely powerful, it's more thinking about what would happen in a world with a single engine monopoly. Some studios would end up with their own proprietary offshoot modded engines like all the engines that spawned out of modified Quake engines back in the day, for instance, goldsrc.
Good point. Though, you'd hope they would've looked at the current Unity debacle and thought "fuck that for a game of soldiers", the backlash was resounding and rightly so.
Not sure if I offended some Bethesda fanboys or my idea sound too much like communism but people don't seem to like it haha.
Starfield is basically a game that's impossible to have an unbiased discussion on. Just by criticizing it you paint a target on your back, and same for when I praise it, though it does have a lot of flaws. I think for the Creation engine in particular it's not only about dodging royalties from using another engine, it's about what they've already put into that engine, and how comfortable the team already is working on it, and the proprietary parts of it that allow for the modding community, console command knowledge, and radiant systems to come along into new Bethesda games.
I would be quite interested to see them attempt working with a new engine and getting over the speed bump of adding these specific systems and implementations into a new engine that works better to begin with, but only time will tell when they finally find that worth it.
What?
Nothing about Starfield is that amazing that you couldn’t replicate it in something like Unreal or even Unity.
Graphics are dead easy on either. Exploration is faked, it’s fast travel to a procedural terrain/level, with a few hand made destinations in between, nothing hard. Modular ship design? Simple. FPS RPG system, simple. Physics engines already exist, storing the location of player placed objects is trivial.
What exactly about Starfield makes you think an engine would need serious modifications for a SF-like game?
Check out my reply to the other person who asked the same thing, it's more of a thought experiment of the limitations of OP's idea that all studios could use one engine to accomplish any game. Starfield features some mechanics and systems that are almost vestigial at this point to the engine, but don't exist inherently in Unreal.