Comment on ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 days agoThey 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 Larian is doing something in the RPG space that, to me, makes nearly all of their competitors feel outdated, and it makes sense to me to make their own engine to do that as efficiently as possible.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.
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.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 days ago
From the other Larian article in this community, it seems their engine improvements are largely things that they claim will allow them to iterate on ideas faster, like going right from mocap to a usable animation more quickly.