alt Hacker NewsThis “flavor” at the engine level doesn’t always make it back up to the end user, and even if it does, it is likely something that could have been replicated by existing engines, if developers cared enough to do it right.
There are very few games where the engine is what made all the difference. Maybe something like Half Life 2 with the source engine is the exception, but ultimately, what makes a game good are traits that can be universally applicable to any engine.
Truth is, it’s not that 90s anymore. Hardware has advanced to the point that you can have general purpose game engines that can be molded to any type of game. You do not need purpose built engines anymore.
And someday, if you can imagine, we’ll just have AI churning out visual representation of game state, turning game development purely into a declarative data driven exercise.
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>There are very few games where the engine is what made all the difference.
Maybe if you ignore the entirety of the retro gaming scene where people are using old engines and modified old engines because they bring along a lot of the feel and expected behavior.
The average modern Unreal and Unity game feels like shit, but some dev's can pull off making new engines behave like old ones we love. It requires a lot of work. Just look at New Bloods catalog of games that pulled it off. DUSK (unity), Amid Evil (UE4), Ultrakill (Unity). Each one of those games had a lot of passion behind them driving for gameplay perfection in the style of a retro game and/or engine.
> we’ll just have AI churning out visual representation of game state, turning game development purely into a declarative data driven exercise
Yeah, no. Perhaps on the mobile slop world as vehicle to sell ads, but I wouldn’t even count those as games.
>Truth is, it’s not that 90s anymore. Hardware has advanced to the point that you can have general purpose game engines that can be molded to any type of game. You do not need purpose built engines anymore.
I disagree, I think there's an over-emphasis on generating high quality individual frames and a expectation of what it is you should be able to do in games.
You can have a game that is photorealistic but you turn around and have your gun barrel poke into the wall and disappear. How many games can you throw enough junk into a river and make it change course eroding a new path for itself as it goes?
Some games rely on clear specific rules of an engine for the player to know because the rules are an integral part of the game, and any inconsistency in implementation creates a feeling of being cheated. Often you can implement such things in standard engines, but you are working against them the entire way.
You could have a game where a player sees a pylon and knows that because it is made of metal you could melt one of the legs and make it fall over. but to do that the entire construction of the game rules are integrated into the world. Most games teach the player that things like pylons are static objects unless they need to be destroyed for a plot point in which case just this one is different. Perhaps the player just has to learn that pylons are one of the class of destroyable things. Making emergent properties goes engine deep.
>And someday, if you can imagine, we’ll just have AI churning out visual representation of game state, turning game development purely into a declarative data driven exercise.
And therein lies the problem. A game engine is game state. You can make it pretty any number of ways, The engine will still be the thing deciding what you can do, and it is the things you can do that makes it play.