Arda Gunes revealed today that it has ditched Unity Engine over Unreal Engine 4 for its upcoming first person perspective RPG, Northern Shadow.
Norther Shadow packs both sandbox elements, and a classical RPG story, and will let players build and manage their own kingdom.
As the team noted, the reasons behind this engine switch were the lack of 64-bit editor in Unity, as well as level streaming.
“Lack of 64-bit editor was the biggest issue, as it single handedly almost halted the development of content. We couldn’t open some of the maps because editor would run out of memory almost instantly due to the heavy amount of objects. Accidental clicks on some of the scene hierarchies would lock the editor up for minutes, and possibly crash it. Level streaming issues prevented us from dividing the levels into smaller sized chunks.”
As a result, the development team decided to bring its game in Unreal Engine 4.
We should note that Unity 5 has addressed the aforementioned issues.
Moreover, this engine switch brought a number of new graphical features to the table:
“We now have a single 103.4sqkm overworld zone that you can seamlessly travel. We’ve added seasons to the game, AI acts accordingly to them and your cities’ requirements change over time. Switch also gave us a free boost to eye-candy department with better Post-Processing, GPU particles, dynamic global illumination, and better Anti-Aliasing.”
Enjoy!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
Contact: Email
Why would anyone use Unity over UE4 in the first place anyway?
Loads of reasons, UE4 is pretty good but if you want to do real time procedural meshes and worlds for example you’re pretty much fucked. The amount of work you would have to put in to make that work nicely would be huge, while in Unity it’s pretty straight forward. As it was said in the article Unity 5 solves the aforementioned issues.
Full disclosure: I’m a Unity developer (I work with Unity, I don’t work for Unity) and I have access to the Unity 5 Beta and Unity is become more and more capable at competing with UE4 and CryEngine in terms of graphics.
Good decision .
Wise decision.
I think unity should be used only for isometric games. Like wasteland 2
Also I can’t understand why it’s so slow on my pc. I can run UE3 games, CryEngine3 games but when it comes to unity games if I can run it will be shit or borderline playable. (example I can run wasteland almost fine but when I tried gone home the game was almost unplayable!,same with tex murphy) I can even run crysis 3 (not maxed of course) and Ryse a bit above minimun graphics
Capable at competing?!… I guess, if you say so. The only problem with that is every Unity game I’ve seen so far looks absolutely horrendous. So bad they couldn’t even compete with games from a decade ago.
You apparently haven’t seen many Unity games. Check out the Unity showcase: http://unity3d.com/showcase/gallery/games
Notable games that look great include Dreamfall Chapters, Endless Legend, Ori and the Blind Forest, Firewatch, Oddworld: New ‘n Tasty, DeadCore, The Forest, Blitzkrieg 3, The Room 2 & 3, rain, Battle Worlds: Kronos, etc.
But really, the main advantage of Unity is that it’s exponentially easier to use than any other engine. A person with little to no programming experience can make a game with Unity. The same can’t be said for Unreal or CryEngine.
None out of those that are actual 3D games look impressive or anywhere close to as good as they could with a proper engine.
The Forrest and Dreamfalf both have stylized, low poly models like Team Fortress. The textures are not impressive either when you get up close. Design wise, in terms of art direction, they do look good but that makes it all the more regrettable that they are being held back by such a limited engine.
Not even the isometric or 2D games are impressive. Blitzkrieg 3 looks about the same as the more than a decade old Commandos. The new Oddworld at times doesn’t look as good as the original. It’s hard to compete with pre baked graphics though, even if they are really old. Still, those are not graphically impressive or competitive games for today’s standards, they’re just not.
Look, it explains a lot when you say it’s so easy to use. For hobbyists that is awesome and I hope they have a lot of fun making their games with Unity. I’m not against that but let’s not pretend that the engine can hang with the big dogs or that there is any reason, excuse more like, for professionals to use such a weak engine.
Northern Shadow looked good before they swapped…..
At least now it will have SLI support.
Unity isn’t a good engine for bigger games . Look at terrible performance of Dreamfall Chapters (Haven’t tried with update yet) .
Dreamfall Chapters’ poor performance (which has been improved with the latest patch) is a problem with optimization and not one inherent to the engine itself. As with all engines, there are certain things you should and shouldn’t do if you want to keep performance high. Given Red Thread’s inexperience with Unity, I’m sure they’ve been doing a lot of things they shouldn’t be doing.
Ah, yes Dreamfall chapters. A sequel I’ve been waiting for years and when it came out I couldn’t play it…If it is a case of bad optimization then every single unity game suffers from it…
I expect the new Elder Scrolls to look much better then this!