Unreal Engine 5, [UE5 Developer Availability 2022-04-05]

AAA is a naff and ill defined term really. Avowed was made by a team of around a 100. Is that really AAA?

Kudos to Obsidian that it's a technically solid use of UE5 and great game to boot.
 
As I posted elsewhere, it's a meaningless, undefined term, and as such it just shouldn't be used. Officially, it's "expensive to make", maybe technically something like "in the top 3% of games based on development cost (including marketing?)". But it's been used so much by gamers to talk about...just not being an indie, I guess, that it's even been robbed of that meaning.

Technical discussion (heck any meaningful discussion) should ditch the term and look at what one thinks 'AAA' means within their argument. So if you are going to use 'AAA' to mean expensive, say 'expensive', and if you would use 'AAA' to mean high quality, use 'high quality'. Otherwise people are arguing at cross-purposes over their own interpretation of 'AAA'.

Edit: I think in terms of how it's typically used to differentiate bigger games from others, they could maybe be called 'major' titles and 'minor' or 'secondary'. A publisher's major titles are the more expensive projects being predicted to make good returns for the investment. Their minor titles are extras, more risky, smaller in scope, that may or may not break out. UE5 is a great facilitator of such minor titles.

Primary and Secondary (and even tertiary), or Major and Minor (and 'tentpole' for major franchises)?
 
Last edited:
I've not come across anything from Obsidian that directly states why they've had more success with UE5 than some other mid-sized teams. The length of development, time to polish and increased maturity of UE5 probably all helped. There's nothing to say that they leaned on the expertise within other MS Studios, which is not to say they didn't. Maybe an unappreciated factor is that many of the staff at Obsidian have been around for a long time. They've worked across many engines and platforms over the years, including at least seven years of multiplatform UE4.
 
Tim Cain mentioned in one of his videos that despite the learning involved, they were able to prototype core gameplay systems of Outer Worlds (UE4 game) in several months. Which, to me, is pretty fast all things considered. But in general I think Obsidian's strength is in worldbuilding and narration. They have great designers and writers, and a custom tech for narration which is engine-agnostic and has been worked on for well over a decade now. They make custom tech for what makes their games special and everything else is fairly "stock". They did some games with Gamebryo, custom tech, Unity, UE3, UE4, and now UE5 but the common ingredient in all of them was good storytelling.
 
bought today Robocop on sale at 9€ on the PS store, it's pretty nice, i saw some assets taken from UE5 library seen in the matrix awakens, like cans and chips bags.
Also, 3D fence !
 

Attachments

  • Robocop_ Rogue City_20250302150605.jpg
    Robocop_ Rogue City_20250302150605.jpg
    1.7 MB · Views: 28
  • Robocop_ Rogue City_20250302150613.jpg
    Robocop_ Rogue City_20250302150613.jpg
    1.1 MB · Views: 27
  • Robocop_ Rogue City_20250302150639.jpg
    Robocop_ Rogue City_20250302150639.jpg
    868.7 KB · Views: 26
  • Robocop_ Rogue City_20250302150645.jpg
    Robocop_ Rogue City_20250302150645.jpg
    869.3 KB · Views: 28
Is avowed the first unreal 5.3 title? outside of fortnight of course.
It's def the first that I know of, and have played. I think those console optimizations are starting to show
5.3.x titles have been releasing over the whole of 2024 - HB2, Still Wakes the Deep, Riven, Nobody Wants to Die, Until Dawn, Marvel Rivals, etc.
We've yet to see a first (non-Fortnite) title on 5.4.
 
i think Robocop is a nice early showing of UE5, for the price i paid (9€) i'm enjoying it, and a really like that level of detail with such nice lighting.
It definitely feels like a next gen game graphically compared to PS4.

 
I guess that might not work in games as well as we'd hope though. In real life you might see the same brands of cans or bags, but they'll be in different states of crumpledness. Seeing the same can with exactly the same distortions might, maybe, start to be recognised across games.
 
That's a task I don't think anyone would mind generative AI taking. Give the program a prop, have it spit out a new, re-textured prop, optionally with some minor mesh deformations.
 
Back
Top