- For Talos Principle 2, Croteam switched from their own engine to UE5. The description was "It would be like attempting to sprint and catch up with a train that is already far down the track and accelerating even faster.". From a user's perspective, observe the graphics of Serious Sam Siberian Mayhem and Talos Principle 2: Same company, released at a similar time. Talos Principle (UE5) looks dramatically better than SS. (In-house engine)
- Jon Blow rolls his own engines (and lang), and releases games very slowly
- Expedition 33 recently released as a phenomenal game that leaned heavily on features in UE5 (Face/body, graphics, map/terrain gen etc.) They focused on the game itself, and let the engine do the heavy lifting... to a superb result.
From my own anecdotes in graphics programming: Producing a simple engine is easy. Producing something that's photorealistic etc is massively more difficult. Let along all the other things an engine provides for you. Modern games have so many complexities the engine abstracts out; we don't need to roll a new engine for each game or studio, each trying to have optimized netcode, human characters, photorealistic lighting, GUI map editors + terrain gen etc.
I use my own graphics engine for my scientific programs, but it has much simpler requirements than a game engine.
Not a gamedev, but I think a huge thing in a modern studio context is being able to parallelize effort. With UE5 you get authoring tools up and down the stack, so your artists and storyboarders and level designers can all start creating the world and setting up the scripted events and cinematics, even if key assets or behaviours aren't in place and are just placeholders. The developers are basically writing plugins into this system in collaboration with the design process.
Very different world from 20-30 years ago where the initial "game design" was happening in paint programs or even graph paper notebooks.
Did you play the Talos Principle Reawakened? They took a great performing game made with their own engine, re-released it with UE5, and now it performs like doggy doodoo.
I did. Was kind of underwhelmed by the graphics too. Although that may be in line with a remake. Ie, I gave it benefit of the doubt since I don't know how much effort they put into it beyond "making it work".
Jonathan Blow seems to stand very strongly on principles, and yet be extremely pragmatic while executing them, which I feel is a good balance that still results in shipping games. That said if he didn't have the work ethic that he does, it probably wouldn't have been a winning strategy.
Not sure there is anything to take away from Talos Principle 2. It was a puzzle + philosophical musings adventure. Could have achieved the same effect with Quake level graphics. So much needless vast (pretty) landscape you had to circumnavigate just to get to the next puzzle arena.
Compared to generic Serious Sam like maps of TP1, I found beautiful environments of TP2 really added another level of appreciation to the game. Those and the music surface up in my memory couple times a week, very few games had this effect on me - maybe only TES3. The game is magical and I'd love more of that.
Oh it was definitely beautiful, it just never seemed relevant to what was happening. More like the art team run amok. TP1 at least had an in universe explanation for the shape of the world.
Spoilers…kinda
I guess Athena and crew have invented literal universe manipulation powers? Allowing them to craft whatever beauty they see fit. Yet, their living quarters always seem to be some dingy basement lab with power cables and other miscellaneous garbage strewn about. The wondrous environments seemed fully disconnected from everything else in the world.
If they had the time and the budget, go nuts, but the game would have been perfectly suitable with significantly lower fidelity graphics.
A lot of the game was spent walking from puzzle to puzzle. I think prioritising graphics was a good choice, because one was forced to notice the landscape.
Then again,UE5 has massive criticism leveraged against it- for pushing exotic and hyped up technology, that is not really production ready and demands you tailor your whole workflow around them. Held against last gen custom engines - ue5 almost always looks worse.
- For Talos Principle 2, Croteam switched from their own engine to UE5. The description was "It would be like attempting to sprint and catch up with a train that is already far down the track and accelerating even faster.". From a user's perspective, observe the graphics of Serious Sam Siberian Mayhem and Talos Principle 2: Same company, released at a similar time. Talos Principle (UE5) looks dramatically better than SS. (In-house engine)
- Jon Blow rolls his own engines (and lang), and releases games very slowly
- Expedition 33 recently released as a phenomenal game that leaned heavily on features in UE5 (Face/body, graphics, map/terrain gen etc.) They focused on the game itself, and let the engine do the heavy lifting... to a superb result.
From my own anecdotes in graphics programming: Producing a simple engine is easy. Producing something that's photorealistic etc is massively more difficult. Let along all the other things an engine provides for you. Modern games have so many complexities the engine abstracts out; we don't need to roll a new engine for each game or studio, each trying to have optimized netcode, human characters, photorealistic lighting, GUI map editors + terrain gen etc.
I use my own graphics engine for my scientific programs, but it has much simpler requirements than a game engine.