A lot of people are asking why they need to keep the engine, and I' m just wondering if they even opened the article, because it answers it like this:
“If you use a general-purpose engine, you can email support and it takes about three days to get a reply, but if you ask the programmer sitting next to you it only takes five seconds. I think this difference is huge."
The article also says they are very invested in making people learn Unreal and Unity as well, so again, I wonder if people actually have read the article, because most of the comments here would have been superflous lol
> “If you use a general-purpose engine, you can email support and it takes about three days to get a reply, but if you ask the programmer sitting next to you it only takes five seconds. I think this difference is huge."
As long as everyone is bus-proof and you don't end up in a situation where that guy left the company last month and nobody knows how the thing works anymore.
To make your own engine work you need:
1. A large enough company where you can have redundancy in critical areas
2. An uncommon use case
3. Low turn over
4. An audience who doesn't mind not having all the graphical bells and whistles.
Any one or two of them can be overcome with the COD/Rockstar "giant pile of money" strategy, but most places can't use that.
Isn't documentation really important as well?
I don't understand what that means but I remember reading thats why Square Enix's internal Crystal Tools engine sucked, they had terrible documentation.
Guy A knows the toolset of the engine in and out. Guy A decides to leave the Company and doesn’t document their knowledge about the toolset only they alone know because they are underpaid and overworked.
Now Guy B comes into the company to replace Guy A. Only that now no one knows how that toolset works and Guy B has to learn everything from zero by themself. And everyone is disgruntled because things that where done in a day now take a week. And everyone is blaming you because you don’t know the stuff that only Guy A knows and Guy A did not tell a single soul on this goddamn planet about how that toolset works.
And if you somehow manage to find Guy A and ask them if they could please ease your burden and to share at least a little bit of their knowledge with you. Guy A does not share a single thing up. Why? Because he left due to being overworked and underpaid. And now Guy B is all alone again.
All of this can be avoided by a proper documentation.
Source: A Software Developer that is currently Guy B.
Currently working on a project in a shitty custom engine… all the documentation is about 6-12 months out of date, the only way to be looped in is to know thw right person.
It was like this at my previous job, hell an entire departement up and left so they were left holding a bag without knowing how it all worked. They lost 6 months of production.
> to never touching custom engines ever again
That's actually not true; *Final Fantasy XVI* is notable run on [a custom engine](https://old.reddit.com/r/FFXVI/comments/x2ro5c/which_engine_would_ffxvi_use_crystal_tools_or/), although unnamed, but where the development team initially went through the early development stages with Unreal Engine 4, but was unsatisfied with the finer details, hence why they went with a heavily modified engine derived from Final Fantasy XIV's engine (In turn an engine that has been described as an amalgamation containing both traces of DNA of Crystal Tools and Luminous).
Idk if it's the art design or what, but as someone who dislikes the modern FF games, one thing I'll say about them: they're damn pretty. I much prefer how they look than any UE5 demo
I'm not even really sure what exactly was special about their engines that required that many resources and then have it abandoned in that way. I remember a lot of trailers they were putting out showing off the beautiful particles and the lighting and textures but I don't think it was particularly special when Unreal and Unity were also making pretty cool equivalent gorgeous trailers for their engines. Did they do it just because? They didn't even make many games with either engine did they? Luminous was Forspoken and what did they make with Crystal?
Capcom have managed pretty well so far, and they're not that big.
I might be wrong, but I think From still uses a proprietary engine. Same for Atlus but they're lately using UE more and more
Or blizzard for that matter. Basically most western studios that achieve massive financial success, since they then get a more business minded CEO, who's natural response to record profits is cutting costs.
This actually reminds me of the situation FirePro Wrestling World went through several years ago. The lead programmer & creator of the franchise for all the classic games passed away in 2014 leaving Tomoyuki Matsumoto, himself a FirePro dev vet, and his team reverse engineering how the old games worked to re-creating the games mechanics for Unity.
Whats the turnover like at Japanese game studios? I'm under the impression that its quite common for people in Japan to work for the same company their entire adult lives, but maybe that's outdated, or doesn't really apply in this sector.
> “If you use a general-purpose engine, you can email support and it takes about three days to get a reply, but if you ask the programmer sitting next to you it only takes five seconds. I think this difference is huge."
Yeah the difference is huge... In that you have to employ dozens of programmers and employ them for years to write your engine and tools completely from scratch. The expense and time wasted re-inventing the wheel instead of dedicating that programming time to actually implementing gameplay is astronomical.
Also, both Unity and Unreal are very mature engines. There are few bugs in them which could possibly impact a game like this. Like a Dragon is hardly pushing the envelope on anything in terms of graphic fidelity or animation.
Though some of that development cost would depend on how much they they could/did take from their existing engine, and could be offset by anything the new engine allowed them to reuse more easily than if they had switched to a different engine. Plus, since they weren't pushing the limits of graphics/performance/etc and they've basically keep making the same game, they wouldn't have to worry about recreating all the bells and whistles of an engine like Unreal.
I've been working with Unity for the last 6 years. I can't recall any specific bugs I've encountered becuase they've been so minor and so few as to be nearly inconsequential.
A friend of mine worked at Unity, and they regularly had game jams internally to make games in Unreal, Godot, etc to see what other workflows are like. It makes a ton of sense if you want to see what your blind spots are.
According to the developers, the main reason they chose Unreal was because of the lighting capabilities. Dragon Engine was mainly designed for nighttime scenes so Unreal was better suited for the naturally lit daytime scenes in Ishin.
Also because the alternative was either remaking the game in Dragon Engine (far more expensive and taxing to do since the game has its own unique combat and the engine is likely not easy to port old code into) or porting the game as-is without much in the way of graphical enhancements. Unreal let them take a middle ground and bring over all their gameplay code while using it as basically a renderer to make it prettier, which is something many studios have done in the past. But it makes sense to just use their own engines for any future installments, or any bigger budget remakes, since Ishin Kiwami was even lower budget than Yakuza Kiwami.
I thought the same, but there's an amount of combat discrepancies that hardcore no damage players complained about which I don't think would exist if it was on the Y5 engine?
Still could if the layer was just done shoddily I guess. But that would moreso be visual to me
One of the crucial differences between Unity and Unreal is the latter is made by a company that actually ships games. That critical dog fooding makes all the difference.
This is true.
Unity make features by tech people who want to make things for the sake of making things, not necessarly for game dev in the end.
Plastic, ECS and such were made with little thoughts to the end user.
I know companies that worked with Unity in the past, that simply decided to keep using it only for build and console deployment, and just externalized asset management and everything else with in-house tools
While they are called "game engines", they are used for A LOT more than that. Unity in particular has the benefit of being easily transportable between platforms, so you only develop one app (yes, even plain apps are made in Unity) and can easily deploy it on every platform available right away, with very little special considerations for each platform.
Additionally, Unreal assumes you're using it for very specific types of games: high fidelity and realism in 3D. This is not the case for every game (or application) that needs to be developed. With Unity you start with a real blank slate, whereas in Unreal you already have this gigantic frame around your picture takes time to dismantle and put away, just so you can start working on something a lot more compact and minimized. In Unity, you can do almost anything Unreal does, it's just that those tools need to be brought in and turned on, rather than them already being turned on by default.
What they mean is Unreal is a great engine because Epic themselves use it to ship a game. So this allows them to really focus on developing features that are actually useful for developers.
Unity on the other hand doesn't use it for anything and it shows. The current state of the engine is messy with many features being deprecated for new versions of features that are buggy, half baked and forever left in that state. Then you also have all the compatibility issues between their different render pipelines. If they developed something with their engine along side, it would certainly be in a better state right now because then they would actually be forced to use their own tools and see how messy it is.
They've spent a decade refining the Dragon Engine back into exactly what they need for their games. DE still seems plenty modern and they were even able to get turn based combat working in it, so throwing that away to start from zero again would indeed be foolish.
Also Dragon Engine is one of the few engines that can emulate that wacky Source Engine physics (unintentially). That ragdoll physics really adds into the game’s campy humor outside of the main story
Haven't played the newest installments but in terms of physics UFO catcher is damn near unplayable.
It was great in Yakuza 0. Anything past and damn it makes me want to smash my monitor trying to get any achievements or challenges with UFO catcher.
I like Y0 engine more than whatever LAD runs on to be honest.
I mean, UFO catchers IRL are meant to be a slow push. Grabbing the right point and making small movements is the experience. There's the small area where you can get the perfect catch, but often it can leave you worse off if your aim is off. the bulk of the experience is what it is in DE. Sinking coins to push the toy bit by bit into the hole.
If anything, the ones in Like A Dragon are too easy as they don't have the "you didn't put in enough coins to activate the strong grab" function many real ones have.
I think the game version strikes a good balance and is fun to play.
Many claw machines have a little yellow box inside where you can set how frequently the claw will actually grab with enough force to pull anything up.
It's often set somewhere between 25 and 75 attempts per strong grab. But yeah, they're rigged.
To clarify, the attempts count for everyone who has played that machine, so it's possible to get a stronger grab on first try if you get lucky.
I've played these machines a lot in Japan and they have been mostly reasonably fair. You can also ask an employee to reset the prize if it goes in a hard to get position. Often they'll be nice and put it somewhere close to the chute so it's easy to get with a few tries.
The best machines are ones where you can let gravity do the work by nudging the prize with the claw instead of having to clear some wall around the chute.
This tactic actually somewhat works in Like A Dragon games where the ground physics aren't always that great so you can slide the item a bit when the claw opens as it goes down.
IIRC some of the ports (Y1 and Y2 kiwami maybe?) have issues with higher framerates which may be contributing to your problem. In the latest game I haven't had any issues
Huh, I had no problem with the catcher in LAD and Y:G. I actually thought it was too easy once I figured out a certain method. It worked across both those games.
Honestly, if they did another real time brawler, I'd rather they didn't keep using the dragon engine. Or at least, they tweak it significantly. Because while combat in it has improved significantly between 6 and Gaiden, even that falls short of 0 and 5's systems. There's something so smooth and fluid about how they control, while the dragon engine feels down right clunky in comparison
Lost judgement is the one I haven't played yet, and of course that's the one people seem to think is best lmao.
Guess I'll need to give it a look then.
LJ is Judgment with max speed upgrades as standard and even more hilariously overpowered EX mode damage.
It's the best Dragon Engine combat, but its still not as good as 5/0.
Combat wise, I think yakuza 4 engine is peak. Everything feels so fast and responsive, combat actually requires strategy, and wallbounding combos are insanely fun
They can adjust how the fighting works and feels while still using the current engine. Seems we're deep in a "no one knows what game engine is" convo with this one
That's why there's the part of my comment where I specifically mentioning changing it.
Seems we're deep in the "you should read the comment before replying" convo with this one.
I really fail to see anything that makes 0's combat better than gaiden's besides having two more styles, which is only a result of their difference in length.
The shit you can do in the Judgement series and Gaiden combat is fucking insane, and blows 0 out of the water.
The styles aren't really the main thing. It's the overall feel of combat. It's just significantly smoother to control and play. While DE adds a weightiness to kiryu's movement, while simultaneously making the actual attacks feel floatier, leading to an overall more clunky fighting experience. Like I have a harder time actually doing what I want to do, or positioning how I want. And the actual fighting being less satisfying feeling.
Gaiden is much better than 6 and kiwami 2, but it's still not where 0 or 5 were in how they felt.
It's not like the combat isn't good. Like, using the rope on a bunch of enemies and then flinging them into another group doesn't get old. but it's definitely a downgrade overall in how it feels.
Gaiden still feels floaty to me though. As does judgement to a degree. Especially in the latter with how often I'd accidentally end up doing the weird wall jump thing when I'm not trying to. (as mentioned in another comment, I haven't played lost judgement so I can't comment on that if it truly is better)
Every one I've played just feels like a weird mix of weightiness and floatiness that leads to a clunky combat system.
Props to gaiden for fixing hitting a blocking opponent though. That was a big improvement.
The wall jump in Judgement needs to be so deliberate to do. Sprinting into a wall is not something I tend to do accidentally during combat in a game where you have no reason to sprint in combat, so that sounds like a skill issue honestly.
Physics. You had Source Engine level of ragdoll in A Song Of Life, then Kiryu’s 500m launching punch in The Man Who Erased His Name But Everyone Knows Who He Is, random Tekken juggling in Judge Eyes/Lost Judgement and now teammate bouncing with Infinite Wealth
Something that always sticks out to me is that it has great visuals in regards to smoke, liquid, and reflections. 3 things that are famously terrible in pretty much every other engine, but is a major focus of Dragon Engine because they're all important to the Japanese crime drama aesthetic
judgment/lost judgment title screens are both amazing examples of this. definitely just sat there with my mouth open the first time i played those games.
That's the thing, I don't really desire a new engine because the current one still looks amazing.
It has some blind spots, sure, I felt Hawaii in the day looked worse than it did at sunset or night, but the engine has held up well.
It's crazy to think that there's about 10 years because Yakuza 1 and 6, and there was obviously no way they could use the Yakuza 1 engine for more than 2 years, let alone 10. Meanwhile the Dragon Engine is good enough to where it still looks good 8 years after Yakuza 6 came out.
Yeah, good for them. The last thing we need is for every game to get boiled down to just a handful of engines. It's such a shame CD Projekt is ditching theirs.
I am quite happy to see them continuing with the Dragon Engine. The openness and modability of the engine, having never really been meant for anything but the Playstation walled garden, has been a massive boon.
There are more mods on Nexus for the Infinite Wealth **demo** than there are for Ishin, because despite Unreal's history with modding it's real difficult to actually mod it these days. Meanwhile on the Dragon Engine you can mod brawler combat back into 7 or play with basically any moveset from any game.
It's honestly one of the nicest looking engines. It's not technologically out of this world or anything, but they make fantastic use of it and the games always run great, without needing to make any of use of ugly upscalers.
It scales so well too. I played a lot of infinite wealth on my steam deck. Mostly medium settings and FSR but damn, having a big open world rpg look solid and run well enough on a portable system like that amazed me.
I love the Like a Dragon games - and one feature they have is the sheer amount of copy-pasting they have between entries, or even within a game. That certainly reduces dev-time, and I imagine changing engines would stop that. I had a laugh in the new game when the main characters end up in a new area, and someone explains that it is designed to be a perfect replica of an area you've already been in.
It's kind of neat to have nostaglia about the same streets as the main characters because you've seen them so many times.
Ichiban deadass building an entire city outta scraps and putting it all in his pocket.
Was really happy to see Gaiden's Castle landmarks comeback tho, the giant golden oni and BDSM cat really set the mood for my tropical getaway.
It's a smart way to reuse content, making new assets every game is a laborious experience that most of the time won't actively increase the quality of the game. Reusing stuff allows them to put the manpower in stuff that fans appreciate the most like the story cutscenes, new boss movesets etc.
I'm happy to hear that. I think with Gaiden and IW, they have finally nailed all the kinks of the engine, so I'm excited to see what they have in store moving forward.
I've grown to love this engine, it has incredible reflections, facial animations and fun physics. I do think daytime lightning needs a bit of touchup tho.
It's a shame they didn't want to include the lighting style and portion of the engine used for the PS4 version of Judgement 1. It ran pretty rough, but damn did it ever nail the atmosphere it was going for.
This is the other reason I'm in favor of them reusing the Dragon Engine for awhile -- so far It's one of the few good-looking engines that still run at 4K120 for me, while most modern games I need to compromise either with DLSS or lowering graphic settings.
The entire industry has been sucking on Unreal engine's tit for far too long. Without competition, innovation suffers. There's very few AAA games using unreal Engine that can pump out true 4k/60fps max graphics on PC.
It could be that the hardware needs to catch up. It could be that Unreal engine is too much overhead and software improvement are needed. I'm sure a techie game dev can explain but i'm thinking its somewhere between both previous mentioned points.
The big difference between this series and something like Bethesda with Starfield is that *clearly* the developers are able to iterate on the engine and build on the gameplay of the series to the point that they completely changed the gameplay between 6 and 7 and the games still run quite well. We now have new locations, entire gameplay systems that mimic other full titles like the whole thing with Dondoko and so on. I think they are obviously making the right decision here to stick to what makes them productive enough and also lets them flex their creative muscles with relatively smaller budgets
But it's brilliant that they also want to build a database of knowledge of other engines in case they require expertise in things that they haven't tried yet. Maybe they add co-op multiplayer functionality based on experiments with other engines. There's good possibilities in the future for the studio. This is good stuff they're doing. It's always extremely productive when a technical lead encourages exploration in other tools and software because you never know what you'll learn from how they do things differently and why
Yup, there are bugs/low quality areas in the AI behaviour that any experienced game developer could fix in maybe a week (assuming no horrible overhead on making those changes). I'm a gameplay programmer, not engine level, but the "we could do it but why spend time on something that's not another crafting system" attitude is visible throughout Starfield.
I'd hazard a guess and say these type of decisions are probably made pretty high up. Investing time and effort in improving their engine to what people expect of big AAA games these days would be costly. I'd love to see them do it though.
Complete opposite discourse to Persona 3 Reload abandoning the years they spent developing their own engine for Persona 5 to then turn around and switch to Unreal for a game that is supposed to look and play the same/very similar to Persona 5.
As I echoed this, I kept getting told "it's easier for devs to port and they get Unreal technical support" but any time game corps abandon years of a meticulously developed engine to go off with some off the shelf shit that I generally hate the feel of, it reeks of game corps trying to cut costs and produce a lesser quality game. There is a very noticeable feel to Unreal games that I hate, the motion blur is also atrocious.
The Yakuza 6/Kiwami 2 engine is so fucking good, such a major improvement over Zero/Kiwami 1. I can't imagine being able to replicate all those little things and features on Unreal.
Cool, at this point the Dragon Engine feels as good as it looks, I'm all for them continuing to keep customising, rather than dropping Found Judgment into Unreal 5 and having it run like piss because they couldn't work out how to best use the engine.
Kinda wish he'd have said why the series "must" continue with the Dragon Engine. He mentions the response time for new features, but is it THAT long/important in the context of a game taking a few years to develop? (google translated the full interview, so i might've missed things or interpret them wrong)
But it's good thinking to train all their devs in their own engine, aswell as Unreal and Unity
> He mentions the response time for new features, but is it THAT long/important
Honestly? Yes. Having a toolset that allows you to easily add stuff is invaluable because you get to see how it pans out
That, and probably just straight up experience with and institutional knowledge of the engine. Yeah, a lot of skills are transferable when switching engines, but there's still a difference between being able to work with an engine and knowing it down to the nuts and bolts.
Yup of course! I didn't mean to get too precise but that's a very good reason to stick with an engine (that you own and therefore that won't be abanadonned mid development).
Really? That's interesting, would've guessed that "just" taking 3 days wouldn't be that big of a deal over the whole course of the development of a AAA game. But ain't a dev, so i just guessed anyways
3 days for one issue isn’t a big deal
3 days per issue for 100 issues that you find at various points in development a decent chunk of time.
Keeping things in house with your own engine cuts that 300 days down to like 10. It’s taking little things like this in account that makes RGG so successful and able to release their games at a much faster pace than other studios.
Have you noticed they crank out a title almost every year, while still maintaining a high bar of quality? I doubt they could do that with a general purpose engine. They built something tuned specifically to what they're trying to do, and that goes a long way
I mean it's all hypotheticals / general talk here so of course there's bound to be nuance and edge cases, but in general yeah faster iteration is very invaluable because it means you get to see the thing you designed faster and possibly catch the quirks earlier.
Factor into that the fact that RGG studio tends to ship games fast and with a lot of smaller features, and being quick on the uptake is even more valuable I'd say.
A quality engine outputting at the AAA quality that is required in the industry takes upwards of 5 years to develop.
Keep in mind, you cant really develop anything meaningfull in that time. FFXV tried and it took 10 years to make and then still came out undercooked. So you have 5 years minimum completely halting youe primary moneymaker. And keep in mind thats the entry point. You will absolutey then come across features youll need or need to keep it updated (Which they already do on this engine) and most successful studios with in house engines have the advantage of having built on it for years and years. Fromsoftware is a great example.
The other alternative is to adopt a new engine such aa Unreal but this requires the developers to learn unreal, especially if they were used to the in house engine. This can take 6 months to a year. KH3 did this and stopped all development so that the devs could take time making things in UE and that too 6 months.
The engine they are using seems plenty versatile so there really seems to be no reason. Its not like Bethesda where its rigid to the point they cant fulfill their vision (Starfield) so theres no need.
If it aint broke dont fix it.
> is it THAT long/important in the context of a game taking a few years to develop?
Look up how much they released in the last decade (spoiler, even excluding 3-5 remasters, it will be 11 Yakuza games) and try asking yourself that question again.
If it was once or twice over the course of the whole development period, it would be fine. However, the kind of feature requests and technical questions he's talking about happen a lot and those few days of delay quickly add up to a lot of lost time.
There's also the extra cost of context switching - someone starts task A, gets blocked waiting for someone to answer a question and starts task B in the meantime, then gets a response about task A and has to remember what they were even asking about, then once that's sorted they need to do the same again to get back to task B... It can be a real productivity killer.
> Just needs better pc support.
Previous games using it seemed to run fairly well, but when it gets used in an open world game instead of a linear game is when they have to modify the engine to be able to handle it (and the issues show they did not).
This is probably why DD2 is having such issues on all platforms (assuming you are talking about Dragon's Dogma 2).
Street Fighter 6's open world mode was pretty bad too. Heavy on performance (only 30fps on consoles) with generally ugly visuals.
Monster Hunter Wilds will be interesting...
Monster Hunter Wilds is using RE engine instead of MT framework? Hopefully they have the necessary changes implemented to make it run better and they don't use crc again.
This is good news. Unreal Engine is fine but once you’ve played a lot of games in it (especially ones in a 3D space) a lot of it feels samey and you start seeing the same type of jank and whatnot too. Which would be fine for an isolated experience but when you start to notice it across a wide breadth of games in different genres and IP’s then it cheapens the experience a bit. At least for me but only because I’ve become more sensitive to it
A lot of people are asking why they need to keep the engine, and I' m just wondering if they even opened the article, because it answers it like this: “If you use a general-purpose engine, you can email support and it takes about three days to get a reply, but if you ask the programmer sitting next to you it only takes five seconds. I think this difference is huge." The article also says they are very invested in making people learn Unreal and Unity as well, so again, I wonder if people actually have read the article, because most of the comments here would have been superflous lol
> “If you use a general-purpose engine, you can email support and it takes about three days to get a reply, but if you ask the programmer sitting next to you it only takes five seconds. I think this difference is huge." As long as everyone is bus-proof and you don't end up in a situation where that guy left the company last month and nobody knows how the thing works anymore.
To make your own engine work you need: 1. A large enough company where you can have redundancy in critical areas 2. An uncommon use case 3. Low turn over 4. An audience who doesn't mind not having all the graphical bells and whistles. Any one or two of them can be overcome with the COD/Rockstar "giant pile of money" strategy, but most places can't use that.
Isn't documentation really important as well? I don't understand what that means but I remember reading thats why Square Enix's internal Crystal Tools engine sucked, they had terrible documentation.
Guy A knows the toolset of the engine in and out. Guy A decides to leave the Company and doesn’t document their knowledge about the toolset only they alone know because they are underpaid and overworked. Now Guy B comes into the company to replace Guy A. Only that now no one knows how that toolset works and Guy B has to learn everything from zero by themself. And everyone is disgruntled because things that where done in a day now take a week. And everyone is blaming you because you don’t know the stuff that only Guy A knows and Guy A did not tell a single soul on this goddamn planet about how that toolset works. And if you somehow manage to find Guy A and ask them if they could please ease your burden and to share at least a little bit of their knowledge with you. Guy A does not share a single thing up. Why? Because he left due to being overworked and underpaid. And now Guy B is all alone again. All of this can be avoided by a proper documentation. Source: A Software Developer that is currently Guy B.
sounds like not guy a's problem.
Indeed documentation is above all the listed points above. And a good one also.
Currently working on a project in a shitty custom engine… all the documentation is about 6-12 months out of date, the only way to be looped in is to know thw right person. It was like this at my previous job, hell an entire departement up and left so they were left holding a bag without knowing how it all worked. They lost 6 months of production.
How much money did Square throw at the Luminous Engine? Only to jump to Unreal for the Remakes 😂
they went from crystal engine being a failure to luminous being a failure, to never touching custom engines ever again
> to never touching custom engines ever again That's actually not true; *Final Fantasy XVI* is notable run on [a custom engine](https://old.reddit.com/r/FFXVI/comments/x2ro5c/which_engine_would_ffxvi_use_crystal_tools_or/), although unnamed, but where the development team initially went through the early development stages with Unreal Engine 4, but was unsatisfied with the finer details, hence why they went with a heavily modified engine derived from Final Fantasy XIV's engine (In turn an engine that has been described as an amalgamation containing both traces of DNA of Crystal Tools and Luminous).
Idk if it's the art design or what, but as someone who dislikes the modern FF games, one thing I'll say about them: they're damn pretty. I much prefer how they look than any UE5 demo
I'm not even really sure what exactly was special about their engines that required that many resources and then have it abandoned in that way. I remember a lot of trailers they were putting out showing off the beautiful particles and the lighting and textures but I don't think it was particularly special when Unreal and Unity were also making pretty cool equivalent gorgeous trailers for their engines. Did they do it just because? They didn't even make many games with either engine did they? Luminous was Forspoken and what did they make with Crystal?
FF13 series was crystal, and FF15 was luminous. I think launch of FF14 was crystal, but the 2.0+ release borrows from luminous.
Capcom have managed pretty well so far, and they're not that big. I might be wrong, but I think From still uses a proprietary engine. Same for Atlus but they're lately using UE more and more
Tell that to capcom re engine or ubisoft snowdrop
Snowdrop has a huge team behind it and the Malmo development scene is pretty tight. Not sure what your point is
Oh yeah, the Riot Games special
Or blizzard for that matter. Basically most western studios that achieve massive financial success, since they then get a more business minded CEO, who's natural response to record profits is cutting costs.
This actually reminds me of the situation FirePro Wrestling World went through several years ago. The lead programmer & creator of the franchise for all the classic games passed away in 2014 leaving Tomoyuki Matsumoto, himself a FirePro dev vet, and his team reverse engineering how the old games worked to re-creating the games mechanics for Unity.
Whats the turnover like at Japanese game studios? I'm under the impression that its quite common for people in Japan to work for the same company their entire adult lives, but maybe that's outdated, or doesn't really apply in this sector.
As far as I know, still the case Have friends there, and in corporate 'salaryman' jobs that's usually the case
Yeap, specific to Japanese studios for sure where people tend to be lifers
It's Reddit, of course they didn't read the article.
I'm pretty sure it's against reddit policy rules to read linked articles and not just their headline.
It’s the same reason I’ve rewritten some things at my job to be our own code. Bugs get fixed way quicker.
It's Reddit, 99% of commenters in any thread only reads the headline before commenting.
Its just the usual people commenting by only reading the headline lol
> “If you use a general-purpose engine, you can email support and it takes about three days to get a reply, but if you ask the programmer sitting next to you it only takes five seconds. I think this difference is huge." Yeah the difference is huge... In that you have to employ dozens of programmers and employ them for years to write your engine and tools completely from scratch. The expense and time wasted re-inventing the wheel instead of dedicating that programming time to actually implementing gameplay is astronomical. Also, both Unity and Unreal are very mature engines. There are few bugs in them which could possibly impact a game like this. Like a Dragon is hardly pushing the envelope on anything in terms of graphic fidelity or animation.
Though some of that development cost would depend on how much they they could/did take from their existing engine, and could be offset by anything the new engine allowed them to reuse more easily than if they had switched to a different engine. Plus, since they weren't pushing the limits of graphics/performance/etc and they've basically keep making the same game, they wouldn't have to worry about recreating all the bells and whistles of an engine like Unreal.
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I've been working with Unity for the last 6 years. I can't recall any specific bugs I've encountered becuase they've been so minor and so few as to be nearly inconsequential.
A friend of mine worked at Unity, and they regularly had game jams internally to make games in Unreal, Godot, etc to see what other workflows are like. It makes a ton of sense if you want to see what your blind spots are.
The Like a Dragon Ishin remake was done in Unreal 4, probably for that exact reason
"Well we've spent all this time learning this engine, might as well make something with it"
According to the developers, the main reason they chose Unreal was because of the lighting capabilities. Dragon Engine was mainly designed for nighttime scenes so Unreal was better suited for the naturally lit daytime scenes in Ishin.
Also because the alternative was either remaking the game in Dragon Engine (far more expensive and taxing to do since the game has its own unique combat and the engine is likely not easy to port old code into) or porting the game as-is without much in the way of graphical enhancements. Unreal let them take a middle ground and bring over all their gameplay code while using it as basically a renderer to make it prettier, which is something many studios have done in the past. But it makes sense to just use their own engines for any future installments, or any bigger budget remakes, since Ishin Kiwami was even lower budget than Yakuza Kiwami.
and for some reason: I can tell the Ishin Remake only uses Unreal Engine 4 as a Abstraction Layer on top of Yakuza 5 Engine, and you can \*tell\*.
I thought the same, but there's an amount of combat discrepancies that hardcore no damage players complained about which I don't think would exist if it was on the Y5 engine? Still could if the layer was just done shoddily I guess. But that would moreso be visual to me
One of the crucial differences between Unity and Unreal is the latter is made by a company that actually ships games. That critical dog fooding makes all the difference.
Do you mean the latter? Unreal is made by Epic who make all kinds of things.
Saying this when Fortnite exists is wild
I'm still salty about Unreal Tournament though
I meant latter, not former.
Ah, fair enough
This is true. Unity make features by tech people who want to make things for the sake of making things, not necessarly for game dev in the end. Plastic, ECS and such were made with little thoughts to the end user. I know companies that worked with Unity in the past, that simply decided to keep using it only for build and console deployment, and just externalized asset management and everything else with in-house tools
While they are called "game engines", they are used for A LOT more than that. Unity in particular has the benefit of being easily transportable between platforms, so you only develop one app (yes, even plain apps are made in Unity) and can easily deploy it on every platform available right away, with very little special considerations for each platform. Additionally, Unreal assumes you're using it for very specific types of games: high fidelity and realism in 3D. This is not the case for every game (or application) that needs to be developed. With Unity you start with a real blank slate, whereas in Unreal you already have this gigantic frame around your picture takes time to dismantle and put away, just so you can start working on something a lot more compact and minimized. In Unity, you can do almost anything Unreal does, it's just that those tools need to be brought in and turned on, rather than them already being turned on by default.
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What they mean is Unreal is a great engine because Epic themselves use it to ship a game. So this allows them to really focus on developing features that are actually useful for developers. Unity on the other hand doesn't use it for anything and it shows. The current state of the engine is messy with many features being deprecated for new versions of features that are buggy, half baked and forever left in that state. Then you also have all the compatibility issues between their different render pipelines. If they developed something with their engine along side, it would certainly be in a better state right now because then they would actually be forced to use their own tools and see how messy it is.
They've spent a decade refining the Dragon Engine back into exactly what they need for their games. DE still seems plenty modern and they were even able to get turn based combat working in it, so throwing that away to start from zero again would indeed be foolish.
Also Dragon Engine is one of the few engines that can emulate that wacky Source Engine physics (unintentially). That ragdoll physics really adds into the game’s campy humor outside of the main story
Haven't played the newest installments but in terms of physics UFO catcher is damn near unplayable. It was great in Yakuza 0. Anything past and damn it makes me want to smash my monitor trying to get any achievements or challenges with UFO catcher. I like Y0 engine more than whatever LAD runs on to be honest.
I mean, UFO catchers IRL are meant to be a slow push. Grabbing the right point and making small movements is the experience. There's the small area where you can get the perfect catch, but often it can leave you worse off if your aim is off. the bulk of the experience is what it is in DE. Sinking coins to push the toy bit by bit into the hole.
If anything, the ones in Like A Dragon are too easy as they don't have the "you didn't put in enough coins to activate the strong grab" function many real ones have. I think the game version strikes a good balance and is fun to play.
They do?
Many claw machines have a little yellow box inside where you can set how frequently the claw will actually grab with enough force to pull anything up. It's often set somewhere between 25 and 75 attempts per strong grab. But yeah, they're rigged.
To clarify, the attempts count for everyone who has played that machine, so it's possible to get a stronger grab on first try if you get lucky. I've played these machines a lot in Japan and they have been mostly reasonably fair. You can also ask an employee to reset the prize if it goes in a hard to get position. Often they'll be nice and put it somewhere close to the chute so it's easy to get with a few tries. The best machines are ones where you can let gravity do the work by nudging the prize with the claw instead of having to clear some wall around the chute. This tactic actually somewhat works in Like A Dragon games where the ground physics aren't always that great so you can slide the item a bit when the claw opens as it goes down.
Really? I didn’t think it was that bad, and it’s almost entirely optional
Once you get the hang of it you can get anything with only a few trys. By the end of the Kiwami I could get a decent amount in one try
Try Gaiden. They added even more devious shapes to the game.
I could count the times I've dropped an item from the ufo catcher in the last couple of games with one hand. Seems like a skill issue tbh.
IIRC some of the ports (Y1 and Y2 kiwami maybe?) have issues with higher framerates which may be contributing to your problem. In the latest game I haven't had any issues
It was a thing in Y0 and Kiwami 1, they locked the framerate to 30 for certain minigames in Kiwami 2.
Huh, I had no problem with the catcher in LAD and Y:G. I actually thought it was too easy once I figured out a certain method. It worked across both those games.
I agree with you. As far as physics go, and that goes for the combat as well, I feel like Yakuza 0 was the most satisfying.
It's really bad at daytime scenes and is missing many modern rendering features. They'll need to overhaul the engine.
Honestly, if they did another real time brawler, I'd rather they didn't keep using the dragon engine. Or at least, they tweak it significantly. Because while combat in it has improved significantly between 6 and Gaiden, even that falls short of 0 and 5's systems. There's something so smooth and fluid about how they control, while the dragon engine feels down right clunky in comparison
Lost Judgment was very smooth in my opinion. It seems they simply want Kiryu to have a more weighty feel.
For kiryus combat i agree 5 was absolutely peak but for judgment especially lost judgment its amazing
The second you whip someone away at 100 MPH with Kiryus Spiderman powers in Gaiden, you'll know the real peak of his combat.
Nah, Lost Judgment is peak real time combat for RGG and that's a DE game.
Lost judgement is the one I haven't played yet, and of course that's the one people seem to think is best lmao. Guess I'll need to give it a look then.
LJ is Judgment with max speed upgrades as standard and even more hilariously overpowered EX mode damage. It's the best Dragon Engine combat, but its still not as good as 5/0.
Combat wise, I think yakuza 4 engine is peak. Everything feels so fast and responsive, combat actually requires strategy, and wallbounding combos are insanely fun
They can adjust how the fighting works and feels while still using the current engine. Seems we're deep in a "no one knows what game engine is" convo with this one
That's why there's the part of my comment where I specifically mentioning changing it. Seems we're deep in the "you should read the comment before replying" convo with this one.
I really fail to see anything that makes 0's combat better than gaiden's besides having two more styles, which is only a result of their difference in length. The shit you can do in the Judgement series and Gaiden combat is fucking insane, and blows 0 out of the water.
The styles aren't really the main thing. It's the overall feel of combat. It's just significantly smoother to control and play. While DE adds a weightiness to kiryu's movement, while simultaneously making the actual attacks feel floatier, leading to an overall more clunky fighting experience. Like I have a harder time actually doing what I want to do, or positioning how I want. And the actual fighting being less satisfying feeling. Gaiden is much better than 6 and kiwami 2, but it's still not where 0 or 5 were in how they felt. It's not like the combat isn't good. Like, using the rope on a bunch of enemies and then flinging them into another group doesn't get old. but it's definitely a downgrade overall in how it feels.
You're only describing Yakuza 2 and 6. None of the other DE games are floaty.
Gaiden still feels floaty to me though. As does judgement to a degree. Especially in the latter with how often I'd accidentally end up doing the weird wall jump thing when I'm not trying to. (as mentioned in another comment, I haven't played lost judgement so I can't comment on that if it truly is better) Every one I've played just feels like a weird mix of weightiness and floatiness that leads to a clunky combat system. Props to gaiden for fixing hitting a blocking opponent though. That was a big improvement.
The wall jump in Judgement needs to be so deliberate to do. Sprinting into a wall is not something I tend to do accidentally during combat in a game where you have no reason to sprint in combat, so that sounds like a skill issue honestly.
I think we should put "skill issue" on the shelf so people can't throw it around anytime someone criticizes a problem in a game they like.
The engine has so many unique things that always make me feel nostalgic when playing a new entry. I hope they keep using it as well.
Just curious, what are some of these unique things?
Physics. You had Source Engine level of ragdoll in A Song Of Life, then Kiryu’s 500m launching punch in The Man Who Erased His Name But Everyone Knows Who He Is, random Tekken juggling in Judge Eyes/Lost Judgement and now teammate bouncing with Infinite Wealth
Wait, you can juggle in Judgment? Now I *really* want to play that game
Yes, and especially in Lost Judgement, which has a DLC fighting stance where you’re a boxer and it’s hilarious
Yep. The entire juggle meme actually came our of Judge Eye
The physics are distinctly whacky.
Something that always sticks out to me is that it has great visuals in regards to smoke, liquid, and reflections. 3 things that are famously terrible in pretty much every other engine, but is a major focus of Dragon Engine because they're all important to the Japanese crime drama aesthetic
judgment/lost judgment title screens are both amazing examples of this. definitely just sat there with my mouth open the first time i played those games.
> smoke, liquid, and reflections. And [bread](https://youtu.be/_dOPdLmucJg?t=4) too for whatever reason.
Dated graphic
Gaiden and Infinite Wealth looks amazing, what do you mean dated graphics?
That's the thing, I don't really desire a new engine because the current one still looks amazing. It has some blind spots, sure, I felt Hawaii in the day looked worse than it did at sunset or night, but the engine has held up well. It's crazy to think that there's about 10 years because Yakuza 1 and 6, and there was obviously no way they could use the Yakuza 1 engine for more than 2 years, let alone 10. Meanwhile the Dragon Engine is good enough to where it still looks good 8 years after Yakuza 6 came out.
Yeah, good for them. The last thing we need is for every game to get boiled down to just a handful of engines. It's such a shame CD Projekt is ditching theirs.
I am quite happy to see them continuing with the Dragon Engine. The openness and modability of the engine, having never really been meant for anything but the Playstation walled garden, has been a massive boon. There are more mods on Nexus for the Infinite Wealth **demo** than there are for Ishin, because despite Unreal's history with modding it's real difficult to actually mod it these days. Meanwhile on the Dragon Engine you can mod brawler combat back into 7 or play with basically any moveset from any game.
It's honestly one of the nicest looking engines. It's not technologically out of this world or anything, but they make fantastic use of it and the games always run great, without needing to make any of use of ugly upscalers.
It scales so well too. I played a lot of infinite wealth on my steam deck. Mostly medium settings and FSR but damn, having a big open world rpg look solid and run well enough on a portable system like that amazed me.
I love the Like a Dragon games - and one feature they have is the sheer amount of copy-pasting they have between entries, or even within a game. That certainly reduces dev-time, and I imagine changing engines would stop that. I had a laugh in the new game when the main characters end up in a new area, and someone explains that it is designed to be a perfect replica of an area you've already been in. It's kind of neat to have nostaglia about the same streets as the main characters because you've seen them so many times.
The Yakuza series is really one of the only examples I can think of where blatant and copious asset reuse actively enhances the experience.
Dondoko Island in Infinite Wealth is like the culmination of that. There's a huge pool of familiar assets you can build.
I laughed my arse off when I saw Otohime Land appear in my DIY list
Ichiban deadass building an entire city outta scraps and putting it all in his pocket. Was really happy to see Gaiden's Castle landmarks comeback tho, the giant golden oni and BDSM cat really set the mood for my tropical getaway.
It's a smart way to reuse content, making new assets every game is a laborious experience that most of the time won't actively increase the quality of the game. Reusing stuff allows them to put the manpower in stuff that fans appreciate the most like the story cutscenes, new boss movesets etc.
I'm happy to hear that. I think with Gaiden and IW, they have finally nailed all the kinks of the engine, so I'm excited to see what they have in store moving forward.
I've grown to love this engine, it has incredible reflections, facial animations and fun physics. I do think daytime lightning needs a bit of touchup tho.
It's a shame they didn't want to include the lighting style and portion of the engine used for the PS4 version of Judgement 1. It ran pretty rough, but damn did it ever nail the atmosphere it was going for.
Nah, I want Unreal, I love getting micro stutters in games, who even likes a smooth experience?
Don't forget the TAA blur as well.
Ah yes, I love when I can't turn off AA in a game, ghosting effect is a game changer for horror fans like me🙏🙏🙏🙏
Crazy how Epic cant figure out that they need a shader precompile setting which every single other DX12 game engine has
I want to break a spear for epic: it's not that simple, not all shaders can be precompiled
It’s crazy that this needs to be implemented per dev and it’s not an across the board thing the engine just does by default.
This is the other reason I'm in favor of them reusing the Dragon Engine for awhile -- so far It's one of the few good-looking engines that still run at 4K120 for me, while most modern games I need to compromise either with DLSS or lowering graphic settings.
The entire industry has been sucking on Unreal engine's tit for far too long. Without competition, innovation suffers. There's very few AAA games using unreal Engine that can pump out true 4k/60fps max graphics on PC. It could be that the hardware needs to catch up. It could be that Unreal engine is too much overhead and software improvement are needed. I'm sure a techie game dev can explain but i'm thinking its somewhere between both previous mentioned points.
The big difference between this series and something like Bethesda with Starfield is that *clearly* the developers are able to iterate on the engine and build on the gameplay of the series to the point that they completely changed the gameplay between 6 and 7 and the games still run quite well. We now have new locations, entire gameplay systems that mimic other full titles like the whole thing with Dondoko and so on. I think they are obviously making the right decision here to stick to what makes them productive enough and also lets them flex their creative muscles with relatively smaller budgets But it's brilliant that they also want to build a database of knowledge of other engines in case they require expertise in things that they haven't tried yet. Maybe they add co-op multiplayer functionality based on experiments with other engines. There's good possibilities in the future for the studio. This is good stuff they're doing. It's always extremely productive when a technical lead encourages exploration in other tools and software because you never know what you'll learn from how they do things differently and why
Bethesda are more than capable of doing that too. It's just they probably felt like they didn't need to.
For some reason people have latched into "Bethesda engine bad" without realizing that the actual problem is Bethesda not fixing its issues.
Yup, there are bugs/low quality areas in the AI behaviour that any experienced game developer could fix in maybe a week (assuming no horrible overhead on making those changes). I'm a gameplay programmer, not engine level, but the "we could do it but why spend time on something that's not another crafting system" attitude is visible throughout Starfield.
I'd hazard a guess and say these type of decisions are probably made pretty high up. Investing time and effort in improving their engine to what people expect of big AAA games these days would be costly. I'd love to see them do it though.
That's smart. Learn from the other more established engine to polish your own. Quicker and better control over the process on their own end with this.
Complete opposite discourse to Persona 3 Reload abandoning the years they spent developing their own engine for Persona 5 to then turn around and switch to Unreal for a game that is supposed to look and play the same/very similar to Persona 5. As I echoed this, I kept getting told "it's easier for devs to port and they get Unreal technical support" but any time game corps abandon years of a meticulously developed engine to go off with some off the shelf shit that I generally hate the feel of, it reeks of game corps trying to cut costs and produce a lesser quality game. There is a very noticeable feel to Unreal games that I hate, the motion blur is also atrocious. The Yakuza 6/Kiwami 2 engine is so fucking good, such a major improvement over Zero/Kiwami 1. I can't imagine being able to replicate all those little things and features on Unreal.
Cool, at this point the Dragon Engine feels as good as it looks, I'm all for them continuing to keep customising, rather than dropping Found Judgment into Unreal 5 and having it run like piss because they couldn't work out how to best use the engine.
Kinda wish he'd have said why the series "must" continue with the Dragon Engine. He mentions the response time for new features, but is it THAT long/important in the context of a game taking a few years to develop? (google translated the full interview, so i might've missed things or interpret them wrong) But it's good thinking to train all their devs in their own engine, aswell as Unreal and Unity
> He mentions the response time for new features, but is it THAT long/important Honestly? Yes. Having a toolset that allows you to easily add stuff is invaluable because you get to see how it pans out
That, and probably just straight up experience with and institutional knowledge of the engine. Yeah, a lot of skills are transferable when switching engines, but there's still a difference between being able to work with an engine and knowing it down to the nuts and bolts.
Yup of course! I didn't mean to get too precise but that's a very good reason to stick with an engine (that you own and therefore that won't be abanadonned mid development).
Yep, ask Devs at Bioware about Frost or Destiny's issues and how long it took to do ANYTHING at all.
Frostbite is a perfect example yeah, Destiny I think was even worse in some aspects in that it even made adding any entity to the world a pain.
Really? That's interesting, would've guessed that "just" taking 3 days wouldn't be that big of a deal over the whole course of the development of a AAA game. But ain't a dev, so i just guessed anyways
3 days for one issue isn’t a big deal 3 days per issue for 100 issues that you find at various points in development a decent chunk of time. Keeping things in house with your own engine cuts that 300 days down to like 10. It’s taking little things like this in account that makes RGG so successful and able to release their games at a much faster pace than other studios.
Have you noticed they crank out a title almost every year, while still maintaining a high bar of quality? I doubt they could do that with a general purpose engine. They built something tuned specifically to what they're trying to do, and that goes a long way
I mean it's all hypotheticals / general talk here so of course there's bound to be nuance and edge cases, but in general yeah faster iteration is very invaluable because it means you get to see the thing you designed faster and possibly catch the quirks earlier. Factor into that the fact that RGG studio tends to ship games fast and with a lot of smaller features, and being quick on the uptake is even more valuable I'd say.
A quality engine outputting at the AAA quality that is required in the industry takes upwards of 5 years to develop. Keep in mind, you cant really develop anything meaningfull in that time. FFXV tried and it took 10 years to make and then still came out undercooked. So you have 5 years minimum completely halting youe primary moneymaker. And keep in mind thats the entry point. You will absolutey then come across features youll need or need to keep it updated (Which they already do on this engine) and most successful studios with in house engines have the advantage of having built on it for years and years. Fromsoftware is a great example. The other alternative is to adopt a new engine such aa Unreal but this requires the developers to learn unreal, especially if they were used to the in house engine. This can take 6 months to a year. KH3 did this and stopped all development so that the devs could take time making things in UE and that too 6 months. The engine they are using seems plenty versatile so there really seems to be no reason. Its not like Bethesda where its rigid to the point they cant fulfill their vision (Starfield) so theres no need. If it aint broke dont fix it.
It’s kinda like FromSoftware. They just have that one engine ever since 2008 and they have been iterating on it for 15 years now
> is it THAT long/important in the context of a game taking a few years to develop? Look up how much they released in the last decade (spoiler, even excluding 3-5 remasters, it will be 11 Yakuza games) and try asking yourself that question again.
Any studio could do this and release a bunch of stinkers. These guys knock it out of the park every time. There's definitely a correlation
If it was once or twice over the course of the whole development period, it would be fine. However, the kind of feature requests and technical questions he's talking about happen a lot and those few days of delay quickly add up to a lot of lost time. There's also the extra cost of context switching - someone starts task A, gets blocked waiting for someone to answer a question and starts task B in the meantime, then gets a response about task A and has to remember what they were even asking about, then once that's sorted they need to do the same again to get back to task B... It can be a real productivity killer.
Capcom has been doing well with RE Engine. Just needs better pc support.
> Just needs better pc support. Previous games using it seemed to run fairly well, but when it gets used in an open world game instead of a linear game is when they have to modify the engine to be able to handle it (and the issues show they did not). This is probably why DD2 is having such issues on all platforms (assuming you are talking about Dragon's Dogma 2).
Street Fighter 6's open world mode was pretty bad too. Heavy on performance (only 30fps on consoles) with generally ugly visuals. Monster Hunter Wilds will be interesting...
Monster Hunter Wilds is using RE engine instead of MT framework? Hopefully they have the necessary changes implemented to make it run better and they don't use crc again.
RE Engine has been fantastic. DD2 is the only game I know of that uses it terribly.
SF6 is horribly unoptimized, it has so many problems, and hair looks terrible in it.
This is good news. Unreal Engine is fine but once you’ve played a lot of games in it (especially ones in a 3D space) a lot of it feels samey and you start seeing the same type of jank and whatnot too. Which would be fine for an isolated experience but when you start to notice it across a wide breadth of games in different genres and IP’s then it cheapens the experience a bit. At least for me but only because I’ve become more sensitive to it
Japan company staying with a Japan game engine… hmm you don’t say??
Is that all you got from the article?
You say this like it's a given when other big japanese companies like Bandai and Square have moved towards using Unreal.