43
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
43 points (97.8% liked)
PC Gaming
8534 readers
756 users here now
For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki
Rules:
- Be Respectful.
- No Spam or Porn.
- No Advertising.
- No Memes.
- No Tech Support.
- No questions about buying/building computers.
- No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
- No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
- No off-topic posts/comments.
- Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates. (Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources. If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
It is so obvious even from just reading the article that it really has nothing to with the engine as staff were already using Unreal and could have just rolled with that. Blizzard has become so utterly irrelevant.
Normally I wouldn't try to be an armchair game developer, but I'm leaning towards agreeing with this. the article does say:
which is a surprise to me, considering how robust it generally is. It's superficial, but I can point to Fortnite as a game using Unreal and supporting a hundred players in one lobby along with being able to spawn custom buildings on the fly.
The closest analogue I can think of is FrostGiant using Unreal for presentation, sound, and inputs, but their custom Snowplay engine for everything else in Stormgate. This makes sense to me given they're trying some tricky and somewhat novel things (at least) on the networking side that Unreal doesn't support.
All that to say: I'm very curious about the details on how Unreal was unable to achieve what they wanted at the number of players they were targeting. I'm also curious why reducing scope (either in number of players or feature set) wasn't a viable option, especially after so long in development. I don't mean this as a "they're obviously dumb and wrong", I am genuinely curious what was planned and not working. I hope we get more details because cancelled games (and the development process as a whole) is fascinating to me.
It could be the networking can't handle what they want. A game like fortnite doesn't need anything super special from a networking perspective. Blizzard lost their best to frostgiant for networking.
Ark Survival Ascended can handle a large number of players as well, apparently. The default max is 70, but that can be changed with ini settings.