Immersive and non-immersive game engines?

Do you have any favorite, or any engine you particularly dislike (you don't need to google the engine name if you don't know it, just mention the game).

With immersive i mean a game where it feels just right to be in the game world, it feels like the objects are actual solid 3D things with weight to them, not like they're made out of paper. Movement feels right. There's minimal to no "pop-ups" of objects and shadows and light in the distance all the time (i hate that, very distracting and ugly), there's minimal clipping errors (also quite immersion breaking).

I'm not sure i have a favorite (i'll think about it some more), but i still find for example Gothic 2 quite immersive, and much of that is due to the engine i believe. It's not without its faults, but it does feel like things in the game has weight to them, it's not the "paper world"-feeling i often get from e.g Bethesda's RPG's. Gothic 2 totally lacks any kind of 2D LOD's, it's the actual 3D objects that you see in the distance, this helps too to immersive myself in the world. It's not just "smoke and mirrors" which many modern 3D games feels like, and often in a not so subtle way.

Engine? No, it's not about the engine.

If I had to pick THE most immersive game I've ever played - that would probably be Alien Isolation.

To me, immersion means the degree to which I forget that I'm playing a game.

Also, recently, I'd say The Division and The Division 2 are close calls. Same goes for Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite.

Yeah, those kind of factors are not really down to the underlying engine - it's about the skill and artistry applied on top. Movement feeling "right" really comes down to animation and camera control, and things like LOD you can implement yourself. Game engines (except for the toy ones like RPGMaker) really only give you a basic framework, and don't dictate as much as people tend to think.

If I had to pick one as having an advantage out of the box, I'd say Cryengine/Lumberyard, because they do natural lighting so well, without much work.

I've had many games where the world and the engine felt really immersive and great but the game itself was just not to my interest at all.
The God of War games are good examples. i found the world/engine immersive and really cool, i liked being there, it felt right. Just didn't care for the rest (too simplistic, too on-rails, didn't care for the combat).

So yes it's about the engine, for this particular question. If you've never had that experience then fine, move on

I could pick an engine based on the amount of times it's been used in immersive games, but that would be pretty incidental.

I agree with Ripper that Cryengine has been part of many great and immersive games - much like Unreal has.

But that's down to engine exposure more than anything.

For instance, IIRC - the engine used for Alien Isolation was a proprietary engine built from scratch for that purpose.

The ideal is always to build the engine for the game, it's just so rare that it happens these days - because of the financial factor and the absurd amount of asset fidelity that's expected.

It's EXTREMELY hard to develop a new and competitive engine that can match up to the big boys - for obvious reasons.

But, if I had to pick the "top engine" right now - I'd go with Snowdrop or "Star Engine" - simply based on the sophistication and features involved.

Frostbite (I will NEVER understand why it's not called FrostbYte) is also a pretty strong one - but I find it has certain issues, especially when it comes to data compression or streaming. I'm not sure why - but almost all Frostbite engine games I've played have had absurdly inefficient data usage and exhaustive load times.

To me, that's just not acceptable. We live in a modern age - and streaming really should be efficient given the amount of open world games around.

Cryengine is pretty good, i agree.. and yes some of it is down to the devs themselves and sometimes their reasoning of what is immersive and how to balance things (performance wise) goes against what i personally would prioritize. To get pretty screenshots seems to have extremely high priority, well above that the world should feel "solid" and not like just a fake backdrop you run around in.

One of the things that Cryengine does particularly well is a high polycount with a good frame rate.

That's one of the reasons the forests were so exceptionally well done in Kingdom Come, for instance. Few engines could match that sort of vegetation fidelity and have it run well at the same time.

It's no wonder Chris Roberts picked that engine as the foundation for Star Citizen. Though, in hindsight, they should probably have made their own engine from scratch - but such things are hard to know beforehand.

Of course, they've switched to Lumberyard - but it's really the same thing in terms of visual fidelity. They've changed everything on a very foundational level - so the "Star Engine" is going to be way, way beyond those others.

Ultimately, assuming they ever finish the thing - there's really not going to be a need for any other engine for the foreseeable future. They should license it out, though that might have legal repercussions

I think Ryse is a good example of an immersive Cryengine game (though it left a lot to be desired as in terms of gameplay.)

The lighting and the water effects are what Cryengine really bring to the table, and trying to implement something as good in other engines is a tall order. Beyond that, though, there's some great animation, camerawork, and sound, that gives it a great sense of weight and movement.

Darth Tagnan said:

Engine? No, it's not about the engine.

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Oddly (right?) I have to agree.

Which means, please open a separate thread about (non)immersive game designs.

Yeah, the engine has very little to do with whether or not a game is immersive. A good developer can make an immersive game with just about any engine, and an incompetent developer can make a non-immersive game regardless of how good the engine is.

I explained very clearly what can make the engine very non-immersive. An incompetent developer can make a bad engine even worse, such was the case with FO:NV, for example. As someone who modded this engine a lot i know exactly how broken it is…
But yes there are also cases with good engines and bad developers. But there are some custom made engines which still are terrible for what they are trying to achieve when it comes to immersion. E.g when you have Z-fighting issues in the backdrop all the time (two textures flickering because they're "fighting" for the same space). There are tons of things that can make an engine very poor for immersion.

That sounds like a poor engine in general. Doesn't mean a good developer can't make an immersive game with it though.

Some engines are better than others obviously. Still, it's up to the developer to make an immersive game. The engine doesn't do that.

I think that the line between engine and the implementation of the game becomes blurred if you have access to the source code of the engine, and, if you build your own engine, it's non-existent. If you have z-fighting issues, you need to do some work on the depth buffer in your renderer - in the same way that you need to do some animation work if your character movement is janky.

JDR13 said:

That sounds like a poor engine in general. Doesn't mean a good developer can't make an immersive game with it though.

Some engines are better than others obviously. Still, it's up to the developer to make an immersive game. The engine doesn't do that.

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The engine is a bigger part of it than people seem to think, and there are big differences of how an engine "feels", even subtle things like movement can make a big difference. I know that i'm a very picky and sensitive person though (its why i began modding) so its fine if you never have experienced e.g a super immersive engine (but perhaps the game was not that good - this has happened to me a lot of times).

You could argue that an engine can be turned into anything, true enough, but this is not what i'm talking about, i'm not talking about dream scenarios, im talking about what we have.

An easy vote for poor player feel is Gamebryo but is that the engine or Bethesda’s implementation of player physics that everyone has been forced to work with? But either way the player to world feel is rather “detached”. The games are otherwise pretty immersive.

vurt said:

The engine is a bigger part of it than people seem to think, and there are big differences of how an engine "feels", even subtle things like movement can make a big difference. I know that i'm a very picky and sensitive person though (its why i began modding) so its fine if you never have experienced e.g a super immersive engine (but perhaps the game was not that good - this has happened to me a lot of times).

You could argue that an engine can be turned into anything, true enough, but this is not what i'm talking about, i'm not talking about dream scenarios, im talking about what we have.

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I've never experiened an immersive engine because there isn't such a thing.

Of course an engine is a huge part of it, but that isn't what makes a game immersive. It's what the developer does with it that makes it immersive. An engine on it's own can't be immerisive no matter how hard you try to spin it.

I think part of the problem might be that you're looking at it from a modder's perspective - where an engine is something written in stone, and you have you have to work around what it gives you. But, if you're the devs working with the code, that's not the way it is. Really, an "engine" is just that part of the code that takes care of the fundamentals, and that is reused so that you don't have to re-invent the wheel every time. But it's not a black box. If there is anything in that code that is an obstacle to what you're trying to do, you change it. And, as I say, if you build a custom "engine" specifically for your game, it's really meaningless to distinguish it from the rest of your code.

JDR13 said:

I've never experiened an immersive engine because there isn't such a thing.

Of course an engine is a huge part of it, but that isn't what makes a game immersive. It's what the developer does with it that makes it immersive. An engine on it's own can't be immerisive no matter how hard you try to spin it.

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It absolutely can for me and i've experienced it many times. Like i said in one of the first posts, if you haven't experienced this its not really the topic for you, no?

@Ripper;: in a dream scenario an engine can be close to 100% perfect yes. Realistically though, its not how it usually ends up. There's a limit to what the developer will do and there are limits to what you can make because of e.g performance. Some of these devs are making cuts (to gain performance) where i would have chosen something else.

…and why would it matter that something could be better in a dream scenario, what we get in the end is what will matter to me as a player. An engine is written in stone, eventually, this since the game needs to be released.

Maybe i should have been more clear, i mean released games, not thought-up games, could-have-been games. I really didn't think i had to make that clear.

vurt said:

@Ripper;: in a dream scenario an engine can be close to 100% perfect yes. Realistically though, its not how it usually ends up. There's a limit to what the developer will do and there are limits to what you can make because of e.g performance. Some of these devs are making cuts (to gain performance) where i would have chosen something else.

…and why would it matter that something could be better in a dream scenario, what we get in the end is what will matter to me as a player. An engine is written in stone, eventually, this since the game needs to be released.

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This makes no sense at all. I don't see what the idea of 100% perfection or dream scenarios has to do with what I'm saying. And, again, your last sentence there leads me to believe that you're not getting the point - the "engine" is just part of the game code, which is often separated from the rest of the game logic, and reused, for reasons of organisation and efficiency. Many games have been coded in which there is no concept of an "engine" at all.

The idea of an immersive engine, as opposed to an immersive game, really doesn't make any sense.

Yeah it does, i've played plenty of games with engines that felt great, where i so wished the game was something else entirely because i felt so immersed with the feel of the engine itself, that it was perfectly balanced in terms of performance and visuals, for example.

If you still don't get it, you didn't experience it, fine, move on.