Why so few Unreal Engine 4 games announced?

[Stringjam]

I think there was more excitement about this stuff when (a lot of) us were expecting independent / small studios to start making great games that the big publishers didn't seem interested in any more.

Well, that kind of hasn't happened. Aside from Star Citizen and a few other old-school RPG remakes in the work, the indie scene has pumped out mostly novelty games.

Maybe there will be a bigger contribution from small devs in the future - I honestly hope there is. The tools are certainly there now to make it easier than ever - it would be a shame if nobody really took advantage of it.

 

[Revolution 11]

The problem is in the assumption that more advanced, shiny engines will make game development easier for indie devs. That's not exactly been true. Yes, there are more features, tools are more mature, and some obstacles have been removed.

But the biggest barrier to large game production is still the budget. You need a incredible amount of money to develop and market a big-name game. Engines like Unity do a good job of helping indie devs but Unity still won't let a 10-person team make the next Battlefield game without serious outside funding.

 

[cmdrdredd]

I think there was more excitement about this stuff when (a lot of) us were expecting independent / small studios to start making great games that the big publishers didn't seem interested in any more.

Well, that kind of hasn't happened. Aside from Star Citizen and a few other old-school RPG remakes in the work, the indie scene has pumped out mostly novelty games.

Maybe there will be a bigger contribution from small devs in the future - I honestly hope there is. The tools are certainly there now to make it easier than ever - it would be a shame if nobody really took advantage of it.

Maybe in a way but I don't know of one game that has been announced that uses the UE4 engine. It is just a lack of anything, not indie vs big publisher so much.

Gaming today is kind of like the movie industry. Make one game or movie and if it has success they keep repeating the same formula over and over. Anything new and unique isn't received with the same excitement. They keep pumping out sequels for the sake of putting out sequels and eventually the quality of the product is reduced. Its like Marvel movies. How many movies do we need for the same 3 or 4 characters? They won't touch some of the more interesting Marvel characters because it isn't popular. In gaming they keep franchises like Halo, CoD, Gears of War and others going for years without really changing the formula. It is OK for fans of those games but it Stagnates everything IMO.

This makes it hard for a developer to break out in the industry and in some ways slows the adoption of new game engines because of the cost. Hopefully the new licensing terms available will alleviate this and cause more devs to start working with the new engines that can better present their vision for a game to their audience.

 

[HeXen]

Maybe in a way but I don't know of one game that has been announced that uses the UE4 engine. It is just a lack of anything, not indie vs big publisher so much.

Gaming today is kind of like the movie industry. Make one game or movie and if it has success they keep repeating the same formula over and over. Anything new and unique isn't received with the same excitement. They keep pumping out sequels for the sake of putting out sequels and eventually the quality of the product is reduced. Its like Marvel movies. How many movies do we need for the same 3 or 4 characters? They won't touch some of the more interesting Marvel characters because it isn't popular. In gaming they keep franchises like Halo, CoD, Gears of War and others going for years without really changing the formula. It is OK for fans of those games but it Stagnates everything IMO.

This makes it hard for a developer to break out in the industry and in some ways slows the adoption of new game engines because of the cost. Hopefully the new licensing terms available will alleviate this and cause more devs to start working with the new engines that can better present their vision for a game to their audience.

There has been 3, I already mentioned them in my first post. Fortnite is developed by Epic of course, Daylight is a survival horror game, not sure what the 3rd one is. Also it's very early, UE4 having 3 titles underway this early is pretty darn good for any such engine and there will very likely be many more over the coming years. UE3 started off a little slow the first year, it took some 4 years until it seemed like most every game was UE3 based. Looking at the new Thief, UE3 certainly has matured since it was first released, it might be a while until more devs are done with their current projects and ready to look at new engines anyway.

However it's a shame this feature was removed

One of the major features of UE4 should have been real-time global illumination using voxel cone tracing, eliminating pre-computed lighting.[40] However, this feature has been removed prior to release for all platforms including the PC because of performance concerns on next-gen consoles

 

[cmdrdredd]

They should have just left it for the PC allowing some sort of toggle for the dev when working on consoles. I am sure I'm simplyfing it and it isn't that simple but it should be possible to have that available and scale down as needed right?

 

[Stringjam]

But the biggest barrier to large game production is still the budget. You need a incredible amount of money to develop and market a big-name game. Engines like Unity do a good job of helping indie devs but Unity still won't let a 10-person team make the next Battlefield game without serious outside funding.

That's the thing though.....I don't want to play a "Battlefield."

The kind of games I look forward to from small dev teams are games like Routine, Raindrop, and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, where the focus is on crafting a story, environment, and interesting gameplay.

I don't have to have $1K+ per second cut-scenes, Hollywood voice actors, and all the other stuff that goes into making massive-budget AAA titles.

It still takes a lot of money to make any game, but small devs like 4A have proven you don't have to create a "blockbuster" to make an awesome game.

It's games like the above that I'm really looking stoked about; I just hope there are more to follow.

 

[HeXen]

^That would be the difference of casual gaming vs immersive gaming. Both can be great but the latter often requires a large budget to stay relevant.

 

[Red Hawk]

You know, Batman Arkham Knight is still using Unreal, and they're limiting it to next-gen consoles, but apparently it's still just using Unreal Engine 3. I'd think that a AAA dev like Rocksteady would upgrade to Unreal Engine 4 if they stuck with Unreal while going next gen.

 

[HeXen]

You know, Batman Arkham Knight is still using Unreal, and they're limiting it to next-gen consoles, but apparently it's still just using Unreal Engine 3. I'd think that a AAA dev like Rocksteady would upgrade to Unreal Engine 4 if they stuck with Unreal while going next gen.

Possibly wasn't ready or available to Rocksteady when they started making Arkham Knight. All the games currently in development have to cycle through first before moving on. Or perhaps they didn't want to retrain to use a new engine or could be a variety of other reasons. I think it would probably look the same anyway, just using a new engine doesn't mean they'll push it.

However, I think it would be foolish not to admit that the latest UE3 looks pretty damn good.

 

[TechBoyJK]

Cripes it just came out, they are still working on hotfixes of for it. Games will be buggy for a while as well. Engines are too complex for there not to be.
So far there's Fortnite,daylight and Primal Carnage. Besides there are so many developers under larger umbrella's like EA or Ubi that they're gonna either use one of their engines or create their own.
Tech demo's always look nice but never look that good for a game anyway nor could they without some serious hardware. Devs using UE4 isn't likely to produce a game much better looking than with any other modern engine no more so than they ever have before. Even Sniper elite 2 doesn't look near as good or has the effects that Crysis 3 did despite using the same engine. Devs have their focus and their budget, a graphics engine won't really change that other than save some time for an earlier release with likely more bugs.

Sniper 2 uses CryEngine, not Sniper Elite.

Sniper 2 looks great!!!!!

 

[PrincessFrosty]

Epic made their mark in the gaming world by making one of the best 3D engines available, by targeting the high end and providing competitive shooters to the market.

Then they sold out to consoles, started making mediocre games for a mediocre platform, moved towards a revenue stream of selling their engine rather than continuing a franchise that made them a lot of money.

To this day they cannot admit UT3 was a failure because they noobed it up, if that's how they want to play it then fine, they can remain ignorant and go under for all I care, they've produced nothing of any value for a decade.

As much as I hate CliffyB at least he jumped ship and has a vision of doing another arena shooter focused at the PC market, if we could get just 1 good modern arena shooter with all the training wheels turned off we have a good shot at bringing back competitive FPS gaming to the PC which was one of its strengths. Screw the casuals.

 

[HeXen]

Then hardly no one would play it like they don't with quake live and UT2k4. Such a small few even care to play those that they would just lose their ass on creating more. Blame the noob for the modern arena shooter all ya want but it doesn't change the fact that few people play the non noob ones anyway.