Indie RPGs - Moving to Better Graphics?

[Myrthos]

At GDC 2014 both Epic and Crytec have announced a subscription model for their respective engines Unreal 4 and CryEngine. With a royalty free $9.90 a month for CryEngine and $19.99 a month (with 5 % royalties) for Unreal 4, better graphics are now within the reach of indie developers.

Although this might be good news for the Indie developers out there, making an RPG requires a lot more from an engine than just making your game look good. As a result both these engines might still need quite a bit of work in order to add that missing functionality. As an alternative to RPG developers out there, Larian's Swen Vincke has hinted a few times already that he is considering providing their engine, which they use for Dragon Commander and Divinity Original Sin, to developers. Although it is doubtfull that Larian wants to enter the market as an engine developer and unclear if they want to provide their engine to others at all, it does look like it is an egine that is quite capable of providing the functionality needed for making an RPG and it is quite a step forward from RPGMaker.

More information.

 

[gandalf.nho]

Unity can do good graphics too, look at Frontiers in the last videos/images...

 

[Nameless one]

Unity can do good graphics too, look at Frontiers in the last videos/images…

Ghost of a tale is also in Unity and it looks even wonderful.
Also few days ago Unity 5 was announce which looks great.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSfakMeW0lw

 

[DArtagnan]

This is great news. Not because of graphics - but because Unity performs like shit.

 

[joxer]

Unreal, CryE, engine from Project D/E, Unity or any other engine just not RPGmaker, please. Pretty please, devs, I'm begging you, take and use anything, just not RPGmaker anymore.

 

[Drithius]

Relatedly, I just got an email from City of Titans, the City of Heroes successor kickstarter, that they'll be using the Unreal Engine.

Good stuff for the industry.

 

[Voqar]

It seems like the majority of games I have that use Unity have some kind of issue and/or a poor UI. Could be developers not doing things well or it could be that Unity isn't all that amazing.

Plus, I don't think it's so much engine that holds back small teams from doing more intense graphics, it's the fact that it takes a team of dozens of artists to create the assets for those engines and for small teams the amount of art work that would need to be done for the beefier engines is beyond the scope of their budget, team size, or reality.

 

[gandalf.nho]

Unreal, CryE, engine from Project D/E, Unity or any other engine just not RPGmaker, please. Pretty please, devs, I'm begging you, take and use anything, just not RPGmaker anymore.

Same here and normally RPGmaker-based games are JRPGs in style too.

It seems like the majority of games I have that use Unity have some kind of issue and/or a poor UI. Could be developers not doing things well or it could be that Unity isn't all that amazing.

I guess is more the devs problem, look at Wasteland 2 and Pillars of Eternity, both are using Unity too and are looking good

 

[rjshae]

Unreal, CryE, engine from Project D/E, Unity or any other engine just not RPGmaker, please. Pretty please, devs, I'm begging you, take and use anything, just not RPGmaker anymore.

My thinking is that RPG Maker could be a useful means for new game builders to break into the hobby and learn key lessons about making enjoyable games. From there, hopefully they will improve their skills and move on to more feature-rich tools. I don't think we should close that door just because veteran gamers don't like the game engine.

 

[Ihaterpg]

For Mac user, the CryStuff is a shit, no way I'll ever pledge a game using that crap. And Unreal just shown its inability to produce multi OS releases.

For Mac users they are just two craps in comparison with Unity. But yeah Unity must improve and offer different way to design UI with multi target OS and Hardware.

My thinking is that RPG Maker could be a useful means for new game builders to break into the hobby and learn key lessons about making enjoyable games. From there, hopefully they will improve their skills and move on to more feature-rich tools. I don't think we should close that door just because veteran gamers don't like the game engine.

RPGMaker is a great idea but really it should offer more diversified bases than pushing RPG to JRPG.

A recent released RPGMaker RPG seems not that bad: Last Dream. Not that I played it but it's a feeling I got.

 

[BrianOConnell]

Unity kind of gets a pass for being free but really if you plan to release a commercial game you will more often than not need the pro edition which is pricey ($75 p/m + $75 p/m each if you want ios and android) and even more so now compared to the two new pricing models for unreal and crytek. For small unity based kickstarter projects a substantial amount of the funding received will inevitably go on purchasing the pro edition which will surely seem wasteful now compared to $9.99 p/m royalty free.

 

[Lucky Day]

There's a lot of people that "know" the Unreal engine - or used to. They have some exclusive deal with Apple keeping the big one cheap there and a small fortune on Android.

When we discovered Unity, our fantasy project re: an open NWN engine was suddenly moved sideways. Its nice to know its doing well enough to have a new one because always knew when a Unity game was installed: graphics card fan would start whining like a cat every five minutes.

 

[Couchpotato]

Well Unity version 5 is almost ready for release. Hopefully that fan overheating bug is gone, and the price gets cheaper.

Link- http://unity3d.com/5

Anyway to get back on topic this would be good news if more developers decide to continue to use unity, or the other two engines. Time will tell as they say.

My thinking is that RPG Maker could be a useful means for new game builders to break into the hobby and learn key lessons about making enjoyable games. From there, hopefully they will improve their skills and move on to more feature-rich tools. I don't think we should close that door just because veteran gamers don't like the game engine.

They wont listen rjshae the hate for anything RPG Maker is to strong on this site.

 

[daveyd]

I'm admittedly not very knowledgeable about such things, but I wonder if it's actually possible to make a decent RPG with either of these engines… The Cryengine and Unreal engine are both engines originally designed for first person shooters… so would it even be possible to make a tactical isometric cRPG with these engines? Or would they be used mainly to make more awful clunky first person Skyrim style action RPGs?… I have little doubt that you can make a beautiful game with these engines, but good graphics does not mean a good game.

OK, Mass Effect series was made with the Unreal Engine, so 3rd person shooters with light RPG elements are possible but what about actual RPGs?

As such I'm far more excited about the possibility of Larian making their D:OS engine available to developers.

 

[RampantCoyote]

Frayed Knights 1 was made with the Torque engine, which was *WAY* more oriented towards first-person shooters than Unreal currently is (and far more than the creators admitted to).

I'm not super-familiar with either engine - it's been years since I did anything with the Unreal engine, but I hear from other developers about it, and I studied up on potentially using CryEngine about two years ago for a non-game-related project. It's my feeling that both would be awesome for many RPG projects, if they are in 3D. For 2D, I'm not so sure, and I suspect there are better tools out there.

Ultimately, the problem is content. Quality content. I expect (from what I have heard / seen) that Unreal and CryEngine can outperform Unity pretty handily on the high-end... but how do you generate that high-end content? That's out of reach of most indies.

 

[GothicGothicness]

I expect superb performance from UE4, it is purely C++, no C# scripts or Unreal Scripts or anything like that.

Regarding Unity, if you have a source code license so you can write your own C++ code on top of Unity you can get good performance, I am sure that is what they are doing in Wastelands 2 and such a high profile titles. While the "lower" end indie titles probably don't have the source code license and is just using it out of the box.

 

[azarhal]

Ultimately, the problem is content. Quality content. I expect (from what I have heard / seen) that Unreal and CryEngine can outperform Unity pretty handily on the high-end… but how do you generate that high-end content? That's out of reach of most indies.

Some people are under the impression that the engine is all that mater for good graphics when it's a lot more dependent on having good artists.

 

[DArtagnan]

I expect superb performance from UE4, it is purely C++, no C# scripts or Unreal Scripts or anything like that.

Regarding Unity, if you have a source code license so you can write your own C++ code on top of Unity you can get good performance, I am sure that is what they are doing in Wastelands 2 and such a high profile titles. While the "lower" end indie titles probably don't have the source code license and is just using it out of the box.

Wasteland 2 doesn't run very well at all yet - and I've tried the most recent beta.

I've yet to see a Unity game of any tangible complexity that runs well.

I'm sure a lot of that is due to developer inexperience - but I doubt it's just that.

 

[gandalf.nho]

Wasteland 2 doesn't run very well at all yet - and I've tried the most recent beta.

I've yet to see a Unity game of any tangible complexity that runs well.

I'm sure a lot of that is due to developer inexperience - but I doubt it's just that.

Strange, don't remember having performance problems with Wasteland 2

 

[DArtagnan]

Strange, don't remember having performance problems with Wasteland 2

I didn't say everyone would have a problem with its performance. Just that it doesn't perform well - considering what it's doing and how it looks.