Unreal! – Why Are Developers Clinging to Just One Engine?

The Unreal Engine has problems. On console it’s often running at sub-1080p resolutions, and stuttering is an issue across the board. Is it time for developers to start looking at other options?

It’s getting to be less and less of a surprise when a major video game franchise suddenly announces it’s going to be running on Unreal from here on out. Halo is the latest to fall, ditching its own engine and instead building future titles in Epic’s software instead. Fair enough. If part of the problem with Halo is having to create and maintain an engine, ditching it makes sense. Let that be someone else’s issue to solve.

It’s hard to feel too passionate about a game engine, and I suspect that’s why this doesn’t get the talking about that it probably deserves. It isn’t exclusivity or pre-order bonuses – something that’s immediately and obviously egregious to those it impacts. Most people probably don’t even realise many of the games they play are running on the same engine. Hell, some of them don’t know games are running on an engine in the first place. Who can blame them?

But there’s no doubt it impacts on everything. As a larger pool of publishers and developers stake their entire future on an external product, that product becomes more and more powerful. Gone are the days when every Unreal game looked faintly familiar, but there are still signs. Not least technical issues plaguing major releases on both consoles and PC.

It’s hard to pin down the blame for these issues. It’s clearly not as simple as waving a magic wand and it being fixed. Combined with everything else though, is it time to start thinking about alternatives?

Swapping out Unreal

There are no shortage of game engines out there, each of them with their own quirks. Some of suitable for AAA development, many of them aren’t. Most of the big publishers have their own engines, which have led to no shortage of internal problems too. It wasn’t unusual a few years ago to hear nightmare tales of developers struggling to put out games because they were mandated to fit a ciruclar game through the square slot of the engine. EA’s Frostbite comes to mind.

And then there are issues with maintenance and upgrades. Bethesda’s Creation Engine has been updated for Starfield, but it’s still the engine that run Skyrim. There’s something that’s recognisably Bethesda built into the engine, which is the benefit of building your tools in-house. And yet the onus to upgrade and maintain is on the company. It’s extra time, it’s extra expense and it’s extra ire when people decide they’re done with your “style”.

Therein lies the problem. The things that make Bethesda games what they are exist in that engine and that engine alone. Making it work in Unreal might be possible, but you would lose a lot. Other developers and publishers have less to lose. What Epic offers ticks every box, and allows focus to sit where it should be: on the games themselves.

With games being expensive and lengthy to make, this is an easy concession to make.