Why have classic 3A titles like "The Witcher" and "Mafia" switched to Unreal Engine 5? | Game Insights
Text | Xue Dexing
Editor | Liu Shiwu
In recent years, it seems that collaborating with commercial third-party engines has become an important choice for 3A game development.
At the TGA 2024 Game of the Year Awards Ceremony, 2K Games and its developer Hangar 13 announced that they would abandon the self-developed Fusion engine and adopt Unreal Engine 5 in the development of the new "Mafia" series game, "Mafia: Homeland".
Similarly, CD Projekt RED also gave up its own REDengine and chose Unreal Engine 5 to develop the next-generation "The Witcher" game. Game director Sebastian Kalemba also revealed that this trailer was also pre-rendered using a customized Unreal Engine 5 based on an undisclosed NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics card.
Looking back at the past two years, games with outstanding performances such as "Black Myth: Wukong" and "Atomic Heart" also have the support of Unreal Engine. Among them, "Black Myth" even switched from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5 during the development process; even large game companies that have long invested resources in self-developed engines and have a certain foundation, such as "Silent Hill 2: Remake" and the "Halo" series, have also turned to Unreal Engine 5.
It is quite common for small and medium-sized studios that lack engine development capabilities to adopt mainstream commercial engines. However, many studios developing 3A games and large-scale games abandon self-developed engines and turn to commercial engines. Does this reflect the changing trend in the game industry in recent years?
Why Is the Wildflower More Appealing Than the Domestic Flower?
To put it simply, a game engine is a complete set of standardized, modularized, and generalized development tools. For large-scale game development that often requires hundreds of people nowadays, a development platform that provides a collaborative environment and a large number of ready-made functions is undoubtedly necessary.
For a long time, self-developed engines have been regarded as a symbol of the strength of game companies, because only large companies can afford the various technical and human costs required to develop an engine. Being able to "prepare" a set of suitable development tools, either for applying to their own games to ensure their industry competitiveness, or for commercial promotion in the industry to collect a toll, in any case, it seems to be a transaction that gains both fame and fortune.
Many well-known game companies will have a set of self-developed and continuously improved game engines based on their technical accumulation, which can then help in the production of multiple games. For example, Valve's Source engine was involved in the production of famous FPS games such as "Half-Life 2" and the "Counter-Strike" series. Its later modified versions even developed battle royale competitive games like "Apex". The "game characteristics" caused by each game manufacturer's development based on self-developed engines are also talked about enthusiastically by players.
"Apex" inherits the classic "easy to burrow into the ground" phenomenon of the Source engine
However, the recent frequent phenomenon of large game companies purchasing commercial engines has to make people sigh that "times have changed".
Looking back at the reasons stated by these studios, the most obvious clue is: Developing or even modifying their own engines has become a thankless task in various aspects.
Former employee Bart Wronski mentioned on Twitter about CDPR's actual usage of its own engine: "They would abandon the entire engine every time and rewrite it from scratch, hoping that it would be better and more efficient this time, but then due to rushing, it would become a mess, making the engine impossible to maintain or use."
The same is true for the developer of the "Halo" series. Art director Chris Matthews said in an interview with Xbox Wire: "Some parts of Slipspace are nearly 25 years old. Although 343 (studio) has been continuously developing it, there are some aspects of the Unreal Engine that we cannot use in Slipspace - and if we try to replicate them, it would require a lot of time and resources."
In the final analysis, game engines always serve the game effects that want to be achieved and the improvement of development efficiency. The consideration of game engines is more of a game of cost and benefit.
Many long-established first-generation engines have accumulated a lot of "technical debt" up to now - that is, certain errors in the engine have been solidified in various ways. Due to the change of developers, the cost of modifying and resolving these bugs is extremely high, and a careless modification of the underlying code may trigger a chain reaction.
In this regard, the commercial engines that have undergone several generations of development and iteration are obviously more solidly based. As mentioned earlier, CDPR's game director Jason Slamajuic himself also said in the live stream that Epic's Unreal Engine 5 is more stable, "at least modifying one piece of code will not affect 1,600 other places".
Therefore, replacing the engine, on the one hand, is a consideration of development efficiency, and on the other hand, it means: Commercial engines have formed a more mature technical system and standardized operating procedures in the development and iteration, and meet or even "exceed the requirements" of large-scale games in multiple aspects such as rendering, physical collision, visual effects, and cross-platform compatibility. We can fully see this from the iteration history of the Unreal Engine.
The Iteration History of Unreal Engine: 26 Years of Accumulation Leading to a Commercial Qualitative Change
The Unreal Engine was first released by Epic Games in 1998, and the game "Unreal Tournament" developed with it was also unveiled at the same time. As the first game in the Unreal series, "Unreal Tournament" attracted many players with its complex maps, diverse weapons, and unique game modes, laying the foundation for the subsequent development of the Unreal Engine.
Based on the first generation, Epic continuously improved and developed the next-generation engine, making improvements in image quality, rendering, operating level, and cross-platform aspects. When Unreal Engine 3 was released, its powerful functions in character modeling, scene construction, and light and shadow effects had brought an epoch-making technological shock to the game industry, so that many domestic online games began to use the lines of "built with the Unreal Engine" and "technological innovation" to promote the quality of their games.
In the Unreal Engine 4 era, the engine has made further progress in large-scale scene construction and game details, and more large-scale games that we are familiar with have been developed, such as "PUBG", "Fortnite", "Final Fantasy VII: Remake". The production capacity and picture quality of the Unreal Engine have been recognized by a wider group.
The character model and facial details of Tifa in "Final Fantasy VII: Remake" are called "great" by players
But looking back at the TGA-winning games from 2014 to 2020, in fact, we can find that although the Unreal series of engines has caused an exclamation of technological revolution and has become "widely known" in the public eye, it is somewhat lacking in a certain "highbrow" artistic component.
Counting from the release of Unreal Engine 4 in 2014 to 2020, there are indeed not many related game works that have won TGA awards. Especially in the Game of the Year, "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt", "Overwatch", "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild", "God of War", "Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice", all of them come from the self-developed engines of large manufacturers.
It was not until 2022 that this "lukewarm" situation was finally replaced by the "explosion" of games based on the Unreal Engine. At this year's TGA ceremony alone, there are more than a dozen large-scale games that are developed or will be developed based on the Unreal Engine.
A more significant change is that the newly released Unreal Engine 5 has already been included in the considerations of well-known game studios and has become a "highbrow" guest. As mentioned above, CDPR, which made "The Witcher 3", and 343 Industries, the developer of the "Halo" series, have both arranged their main new works to be developed and produced based on Unreal Engine 5. The former hopes to improve the efficiency of multi-project co-development, while the latter expects the visual effects and technical possibilities that Unreal Engine 5 brings in reconstructing the "Halo" world.
An experimental project work of Halo Studios built based on Unreal Engine 5
The technical breakthroughs of Unreal Engine 5 are now obvious to all. From the Lumen dynamic global illumination technology that brings a full-dynamic lighting solution, to the Nanite virtual geometry technology that supports the direct import of high-precision models with hundreds of millions of polygons, to the introduction of the Niagara particle system for GPU particle simulation... We can fully imagine the leading position of this engine in aspects such as picture rendering, production efficiency, and collaborative system.
No matter for what reasons these studios abandon the self-developed engines with years of technical investment and accumulation, the great progress of Unreal Engine 5 in technology and the subsequent commercial level is a fact.
It can even be said that the commercial progress of Unreal Engine 5 is a qualitative change under the accumulation of quantitative changes compared to the other four generations, meaning that third-party engines have essentially begun to replace the self-developed engines that used to show their unique skills in the development of 3A-level games.
Of course, Unreal Engine 5 is not so "all-round". After all, an engine will still have its own fixed characteristics, and no commercial engine can fully meet the unique concepts of game development for manufacturers. A few days ago, Ubisoft technical director Pierre Fortin said in an interview with foreign media that the development of "Assassin's Creed: Shadow" still uses its own AnvilNext engine instead of Epic Games' Unreal Engine 5 because they "have different views on optimizing the gameplay and aspects".
So rather than saying that Unreal Engine 5 can replace self-developed engines to create "unique 3A masterpieces", it is better to say that under the consideration of development cost and benefit, some manufacturers have failed on the road of self-developed engines. When the use cost and effect of commercial engines develop to a sufficiently attractive level, it is not surprising that some old self-developed engines are out of favor - because the young game industry is slowly shifting from workshop-style creative technology development to factory-like clustered and standardized production.
The Future of Game Engines...
At present, the mainstream third-party engines led by Unity, Unreal, Cocos, and Godot have actually covered the majority of game production, from mobile mini-programs to PC terminals, and from large 3D open worlds to 2D pixel styles.
To some extent, after the emergence of Unreal Engine 5, even for large studios that want to create iconic games and pursue gameplay, plot, and picture quality, third-party engines have become an attractive choice.
If we regard game production as mining, then for the clustered cooperation required by large 3A games, standard, convenient, and complete sets of mechanical equipment are undoubtedly a direction of effort. With the development and market expansion of mainstream commercial engines, the benefits of game companies making their own shovels and equipment seem to be getting lower and lower. Looking at this trend:
The first prediction is that as the territory of third-party engines continues to expand, the competition among commercial engine companies is likely to become more intense, and game developers who "waver" depending on the charging situation will also become the objects that developers fiercely compete for. Events similar to the Unity charging controversy are likely to be repeated in the future.
And not only the competition among engine developers, but will game content companies that are unwilling to give up the development discourse also enter the field? Or even will technology companies on the new trend also want to get a share?
In the second half of this year, the Google team developed a new game engine technology called GameGen, which can generate high-quality game images in real time and respond to the input operations of players. A few days ago at the China Game Industry Annual Conference, Giant Network also released the "Qianying" audio game generation large model, showing its early layout of the AI game engine, which may have already explained the answer.
Finally, as an ordinary game player, I may be amazed by the improvement in picture and performance brought by the Unreal Engine, but I also do not want to see a scene where Unreal Engine 5 takes care of all large-scale games. After all, this not only represents a certain monopoly threat in the game industry, but also means the homogenization of game styles and characteristics.
The Unreal Engine pursues the extreme coincidence of the game picture with the real world, and such a style is only one of all possible styles. When this style is mass-produced and recognized, the corresponding burnout often follows.
Therefore, after being bombarded by the successive visual impacts of numerous industrial-level luxury masterpieces, we will instead look forward to a pastoral "workshop game" - and this may also be a reason why "Astro Bot" won the TGA Game of the Year this year.
This article was first published on the WeChat public account "36Kr Games".