They said very little about what that new engine entails, but much like Starfield, I suspect it’s largely reusing their old engine and only remaking select parts of it. Larian is doing something in the RPG space that, to me, makes nearly all of their competitors feel outdated, and it makes sense to me to make their own engine to do that as efficiently as possible. To make one of their games in an off the shelf engine like Unreal, with all of the bespoke physics objects and the ways every entity interacts with spells, elements, and other effects, could easily result in huge performance costs above and beyond what we saw in Act 3 of BG3.
Comment on ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 days ago
At first, Larian had planned to continue working with Hasbro’s Wizards of the Coast division on Dungeons & Dragons, but Vincke said he and his team spent a few months working on a new project before realizing they weren’t feeling the excitement they once did. “Conceptually, all of the ingredients for a really cool game were there except the hearts of the developers,” he said. They abandoned that game last year and pivoted to Divinity, a franchise that Larian also happens to own.
It’s crazy they have the finances to be working on a D&D franchise game and decide “…Nah. Let’s do something else.”
They recently switched to a new engine…
Uh oh.
I know folks like to hate on Unity, and Borderlands 3. Rightfully so. But let me list out some “in house engine” releases:
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Cyberpunk 2077, which Nvidia backing
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Mass Effect Andromeda, after previously being Unreal
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Starfield
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Paradox Grand Strategy, like Stellaris
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A “smaller studio” example, Distant Worlds 2
All these drug their developers through hell, and we’re still technical messes at release.
Now let’s look at some others:
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KCD2: CryEngine
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Expedition 33: Unreal
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Black Myth Wukong: Unreal
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Stray: Unreal
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As a “smaller studio” example, Satisfactory: Unreal
…I’m just saying. Making a modern engine from scratch is hard. There are a lot of things to worry about. And the record of “RPG studios rolling a new in house engine” is not great.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 days ago
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Depends how much they “redo”.
I’m utterly terrified of them pulling an Andromeda/2077 and getting stuck in dev hell trying to debug the new engine bits instead of actually building the game. This is the advantage of prebuilt engines: someone else has already one all the low level legwork for you.
I’m less afraid of them pulling a Starfield, I suppose. The “divinity engine” in BG3 already runs okay. It’s not sleek like KCD2, but it doesn’t feel janky or dated either, and even the mildest refresh over BG3 would be fine.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Much less is determined by engine than the average person thinks. Andromeda wasn’t a new engine; it was an engine that was made to make Battlefield games that then had to be used to make action RPGs and racing games after the fact. Capcom made an engine for the games they had in mind 10 years ago, and it’s fantastic at Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, and even serving as an emulation wrapper, but it’s showing cracks under the support for open world games that they added more recently. Larian’s engine is made to support the systems driven RPGs they conceptualized in the early 2010s, and there’s little chance some other engine will do it just as well or better without plenty of custom code anyway. Ask Digital Foundry about all of the “optimization” Unreal 5 has done for developers already.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 days ago
This is a fair point. When I made the original comment, I didn’t realize their in house engine went so far back:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divinity_Engine
If they can shoehorn in something like KCD2’s or Satisfactory’s Global Illumination, but keep their workflows, that’d be perfect.
tomkatt@lemmy.world 1 day ago
…I’m just saying. Making a modern engine from scratch is hard. There are just too many things to worry about. And the record of “RPG studios rolling a new in house engine” is not great.
Larian’s track record is good. They used an in-house engine for Divinity: Original Sin, Divinity: Original Sin 2, and Baldur’s Gate 3. And Vincke attributes at least part of their success to using in-house tools instead of “off the shelf” engines.
MimicJar@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Re D&D,
It’s because Hasbro gutted the D&D division and burned their goodwill with Larian. pcgamer.com/theres-almost-nobody-left-ceo-of-bald…
Hasbro could have done nothing and made a bunch of money, but they chose temporary short term gains. Baldur’s Gate 4 will arrive far sooner than you think, and it will be terrible.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 day ago
WTF. That’s awful, and also totally baffling. “This single game is responsible for a huge chunk of revenue and introducting countless people to D&D; let’s lay off its staff and leadership.”
What do you mean by this? An outsourced spinoff is already in the works?
MimicJar@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Nothing has been announced as far as Baldur’s Gate 4 goes yet. It looks like Hasbro is being a little bit smart and are going to try and make (“make”) a handful of other smaller games, like the recent Warlock game announcement.
But at some point Baldur’s Gate 4 will be announced, but Hasbro isn’t going to be willing to invest properly into it in order to make a good game.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That’s a very… abstract trailer.
Yeah, I’m suspicious too.