PorkyThePaladin
Arcane
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2013
- Messages
- 5,153
Back in the day, RPG studios typically used to develop their own engines for their games. Bioware made their famous Infinity Engine, which they used for their Baldur's Gate series, and also licensed to Black Isle Studios for Planescape: Torment and the Icewind Dale games. Black Isle created the Fallout engine (whatever it was called), and later, Troika used some simile of it for Arcanum. Troika also developed their own engine for ToEE. Origin was famous for creating new engines for each Ultima.
As games entered the 3D era, creating fully featured 3D engines was a much more significant investment, and gradually, RPGs started using stock engine from third parties, such as Unity, Gamebryo, Unreal Engine, and CryEngine. They still of course build up their own code libraries around the base engine, but it saves them a lot of work, and lets them use the work of other people more qualified in that area.
What I am wondering about is if it would make more sense to have third party developers for certain aspects of gameplay as well. Take combat for example. It is not a secret that the vast majority of combat in RPGs is absolutely horrible. Some of the greatest RPGs ever are guilty of this, including games such as PS:T, Ultima Underworld, Arcanum, Deus Ex, and many others. There are various reasons for this, but some of the most important ones are lack of resources and expertise.
RPGs are massive games, easily dwarfing most other genres. They must have a ton of content, fleshed out worlds, dialogue and storylines, characters and quests, choices and myriad of items. So naturally, because they must spread out their resources to cover the making of all of this, they will have a lot less left over for combat than say a first person shooter or a tactical squad game.
In addition to that, RPG developers are often people who are drawn to story-telling and dialogue, quests and choices and consequences, and deep game lore. Such people might not necessarily be the best at designing combat systems.
But imagine if there were third party developers dedicated entirely to creating easily integrated and in-depth combat systems. They would have let's say several modules (one for each popular game engine), that you could easily plug into your game. Maybe they would have different modules, one for first/third person action combat, one for isometric tactical combat. Maybe each of those would be handled by a different company.
The point is that this third party company or companies would dedicate all their time to making great combat systems. They could spend hundreds of times more resources on this than the average RPG studio, and in return, develop stuff that right now we can only dream about. Their tactical module would have hundreds of options that would make Jagged Alliance 2 look like a board game, and their action system would pretty much model HEMA combat so that it would look like a youtube video from lindybeige.
Most importantly, because they would constantly iterate over these systems, they could accept feedback from the people playing games with their modules, and contantly improve them. Unlike typical RPG studios, who often move on to different systems altogether, or go under, or ignore feedback like Bethesda.
As games entered the 3D era, creating fully featured 3D engines was a much more significant investment, and gradually, RPGs started using stock engine from third parties, such as Unity, Gamebryo, Unreal Engine, and CryEngine. They still of course build up their own code libraries around the base engine, but it saves them a lot of work, and lets them use the work of other people more qualified in that area.
What I am wondering about is if it would make more sense to have third party developers for certain aspects of gameplay as well. Take combat for example. It is not a secret that the vast majority of combat in RPGs is absolutely horrible. Some of the greatest RPGs ever are guilty of this, including games such as PS:T, Ultima Underworld, Arcanum, Deus Ex, and many others. There are various reasons for this, but some of the most important ones are lack of resources and expertise.
RPGs are massive games, easily dwarfing most other genres. They must have a ton of content, fleshed out worlds, dialogue and storylines, characters and quests, choices and myriad of items. So naturally, because they must spread out their resources to cover the making of all of this, they will have a lot less left over for combat than say a first person shooter or a tactical squad game.
In addition to that, RPG developers are often people who are drawn to story-telling and dialogue, quests and choices and consequences, and deep game lore. Such people might not necessarily be the best at designing combat systems.
But imagine if there were third party developers dedicated entirely to creating easily integrated and in-depth combat systems. They would have let's say several modules (one for each popular game engine), that you could easily plug into your game. Maybe they would have different modules, one for first/third person action combat, one for isometric tactical combat. Maybe each of those would be handled by a different company.
The point is that this third party company or companies would dedicate all their time to making great combat systems. They could spend hundreds of times more resources on this than the average RPG studio, and in return, develop stuff that right now we can only dream about. Their tactical module would have hundreds of options that would make Jagged Alliance 2 look like a board game, and their action system would pretty much model HEMA combat so that it would look like a youtube video from lindybeige.
Most importantly, because they would constantly iterate over these systems, they could accept feedback from the people playing games with their modules, and contantly improve them. Unlike typical RPG studios, who often move on to different systems altogether, or go under, or ignore feedback like Bethesda.
