The Witcher - Announcement of a New Game

IIRC they had to change a lot in their engine because of how vertical the CP world was. At this stage, I don't understand why they hadn't switched to Unreal, it should have been exactly what they needed. It makes sense to have one's own engine as long as it's easy to evolve along with the games using it.

But I suppose that they wanted to avoid the cost of migrating from all their tools and flows to a new engine. Then there's always the fear it won't fit either and cost more time to overcome all the problem of a 3rd-party product vs working on one's known code. See what it cost to BioWare when they decided to use Frostbite.

Morrandir said:

Yep, that makes a lot of sense.

Using an engine for only one game is pointless. You either have to licence your engine to others to make money, or licence another engine and pay money but save workload.

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Agreed, except licencing an engine requires a lot more work for the support and to keep a clean & documented API. If you want to sell it, chances are you'll have to adapt it to your first clients so it's adopted, supporting use-case you don't need for your own games. It's just a different strategy.

I think using a custom made engine is the best, if you want to make the best possible game. The problem with a licensed engine is that their might be limits in the engine preventing you to do what you want. Of Course I don't think that'd be an issue with a Witcher game, which is quite simple from a technical point of view.

Cyberpunk might have been harder though.

GothicGothicness said:

I think using a custom made engine is the best, if you want to make the best possible game. The problem with a licensed engine is that their might be limits in the engine preventing you to do what you want. Of Course I don't think that'd be an issue with a Witcher game, which is quite simple from a technical point of view.

Cyberpunk might have been harder though.

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It's often the other way around. Very few companies have the wherewithal to create, update and maintain a top notch engine, thus many companies licensing an engine from someone who specializes in that.

JFarrell71 said:

It's often the other way around. Very few companies have the wherewithal to create, update and maintain a top notch engine, thus many companies licensing an engine from someone who specializes in that.

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Obviously, only companies with a lot of resources has the option to create their own engine, but like I said, if they have the resources to do that, a custom made engine especially made for their game will be the best.

GothicGothicness said:

Obviously, only companies with a lot of resources has the option to create their own engine, but like I said, if they have the resources to do that, a custom made engine especially made for their game will be the best.

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In a world of infinite time and money, you may be right, but in real life, it's never that way. Even if a company does have the time and money (salaries) to spend on their own engine, it's easily arguable that if those same resources were poured into the actual game rather than spent re-inventing the wheel developing/modifying their own engine, the resulting game could be better in the end. It's not so black & white.

Stingray said:

In a world of infinite time and money, you may be right, but in real life, it's never that way. Even if a company does have the time and money (salaries) to spend on their own engine, it's easily arguable that if those same resources were poured into the actual game rather than spent re-inventing the wheel developing/modifying their own engine, the resulting game could be better in the end. It's not so black & white.

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I do see your point, it also depends on what kind of game you want to make, if you want to make an innovative game with graphics, physics AI and game-play never seen before, or if you want to make the best story ever made,with a lot of amazing quests. In case one making your own engine would probably be of much benefit, but for number two, spend all your resources on content instead.