Halo's Rumoured Unreal Engine 5 Switch Makes Sense - But It's Still A Tragedy

Heruitgegeven door Plato

volgers: 0

There's a new trend in video game development. Game studios, even large ones, are binning their own bespoke engines and moving to Unreal Engine instead. We've seen it with CDPR en The Witcher, we've seen it with Crystal Dynamics en Tomb Raider, and now it's happening to another huge franchise: Halo.

343 Industries, de belaagde rentmeester van de franchise, kreeg veel kritiek te verduren na de eerste onthulling van Halo Infinite, grotendeels over de graphics. Despite significant improvements up to and beyond the game's launch, it's clear that the game didn't live up to expectations and now the developer is 'alles behalve vanaf nul beginnen' on the next Halo game, with at least 95 developers fired and a switch to Unreal Engine 5 planned - according to a Bloomberg report.

It's this story that dominates this week's Digital Foundry Direct discussions, with John Linneman, Alex Battaglia and special guest Sam Machkovech expressing their views on the matter.

In my view, it's a tragedy, both for the developers involved and the Slipspace Engine that powered Halo Infinite. The demise of in-house engines necessarily means a loss in variety when it comes to rendering techniques, art styles and more, and even contributes to issues like the Stotterstrijd-epidemie - our term for the shader compilation stutters that plagued PC games, most frequently Unreal Engine 4 releases, over the past few years. It also puts a lot of power into the hands of Unreal Engine creators Epic, who have done well to push graphical rendering techniques forward over the years but (understandably) have their own preferences for how games ought to play, ought to look and ought to be developed.

Bespoke engines have the latitude to do something different, emphasise graphical techniques, features or development styles that better suit an individual team or specific player base, but it seems that they also represent an often unacceptable risk for developers and publishers who have to justify the extra time and money to create, maintain and train new hires on an in-house engine. It's the maintenance side of things that appears to often be the stumbling block, with the talented developers of games as disparate as Halo Infinite, Counter-Strike Global Offensive and Cyberpunk 2077 struggling to fix long-standing bugs or add much-requested features due to messy, spaghettified codebases, the legacy of years or even decades of in-house engine development.

In this sense, switching to Unreal Engine 5 allows for a clean break, a chance to get rid of the legacy cruft and start again from a sturdy foundation - I just hope that it doesn't stifle ambition or lead to a generation of bland, cookie-cutter game graphics. Hi-Fi Rush is een geweldig tegenvoorbeeld van wat je kunt doen om het uiterlijk van een Unreal Engine-game te ondermijnen en iets speciaals te krijgen, dus duimen dat andere ontwikkelaars dit opmerken.

00:00:00 Introductie
00:01:53 Nieuws 01: Halo-ontwikkelaar wordt ontslagen en stapt over naar UE5?
00:17:37 Nieuws 02: Grote live servicegames geannuleerd
00:27:11 Nieuws 03: DLSS 3 toegevoegd aan Cyberpunk 2077, Dying Light 2
00:36:21 Nieuws 04: The Witcher 3 krijgt RT-prestatieverbeteringen
00:43:11 Nieuws 05: Goldeneye wordt gelanceerd op Xbox, Switch
00:53:56 Nieuws 06: PS5-bètafirmware voegt 1440p VRR-ondersteuning toe
01:05:04 DF Supporter Q1: Sam, je noemde de RTX 4090 een koopje. Welke andere koopjes raad je aan?
01:09:04 DF-supporter Vraag 2: Heeft u getest met het kopiëren van de shader-cache van de ene pc naar de andere om shader-stotteren te elimineren?
01:10:08 DF-supporter Q3: Zou Square Enix in financiële problemen kunnen komen na de slechte ontvangst van Forspoken?
01:13:51 DF Supporter Q4: Zou de VR2, nu de pre-orders voor PS VR2 naar verluidt lager zijn dan verwacht, de weg van de Vita kunnen inslaan?
01:18:58 DF-supporter Vraag 5: Denkt u dat het veilig is om op een gaming-installatie naar Windows 11 over te stappen?

Elsewhere in the show, Alex, John and Sam discuss the recent cancellation of live service games - which seem destined to either make huge amounts of money or die off almost immediately - and in more positive news, the RT improvements to The Witcher 3 and the addition of DLSS 3 to Cyberpunk and Dying Light 2.

We've recently behandelde de Goldeneye 007 Xbox- en Switch-releases volledig, so let's move onto the final news item this week: a new PS5 beta firmware that adds VRR to 1440p - it was previously only available at 1080p or 4K. This makes a ton of sense, given the number of gaming monitors that hit that 1440p 120Hz+ VRR spec. The update also adds Discord voice calls to PS5, ensuring you don't need to get a headset that supports simultaneous Bluetooth (to mobile Discord) and 2.4GHz (to PS5) to chat with friends cross-platform. There are some other changes discussed too, with the theme seemingly being quality of life improvements that don't radically change the experience but do bring the PS5 user experience closer to the high bar set by the final iteration of the PS4 OS.

We had some great supporter questions too, discussing PS VR2 pre-orders, testing copying the shader cache from one PC to another - a kind of manual Shader Butler?! - and how the RTX 4090 is a 'bargain' according to Sam. Moreover, is Windows 11 actually 'safe' for gaming these days - or is Windows 10 still the way to go?

I won't spoil the answers to these questions, but I will mention that you can submit your own questions for us to answer in the Direct by lid worden van de DF Patreon. Het ondersteunt het werk dat we doen en geeft je toegang tot een hele fijne gemeenschap van gelijkgestemde mensen op Discord. Dus: doe mee!

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