343 should have focused on making the game itself and polishing it instead of making a new engine to please the graphics hounds.
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Iāve been saying this for years. Engines are typically just PR nonsense about how a sequel is superior to the predecessor due to technical psycho babble (Todd Howardās infamous 16 times the detail is most hilarious example I can think of)
Engineās donāt mean good games, good devs do lol.
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Exactly! Iāve seen games be damn near masterpieces and they were built on some of the worst engines imaginable.
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The new engine wasnāt so much to please the āgraphics houndsā (is this an actual term?) - but, from what theyāve said, to make it faster / easier to add graphic assets.
Apparently it was a nightmare to add stuff into the old Blam! version. Sounds like even making minor changes to maps was torture for the graphics team.
Which makes what they did with Forge a minor miracle!
The new engine may provide some hiccoughs along the way - but it will hopefully pay off in the next few years.
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Its not even a new engine didnt people say they just updated the old one and used the same coding?
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Well thankfully it should make all new Halos easier to make.
Without an intracate knowledge of coding and game design I donāt know how anyone besides 343i themselves could really answer that.
Even if you go from the engine in Reach to the Engine in Halo 4 there are some obvious differences. Reach for example was focused on putting tons of enemies (AIās) on the screen at once, while Halo 4 was all about making everything high fidelity so AI was worse comparatively.
The biggest question mark isnāt what the engine is capable of (although thatās important) the biggest question is if previous console generation holds back this current generation of hardware and it makes things look worse or play worse. The good thing here is that if 343i release DLC or add new modes they could always soft lock the experience. No reason why every single aspect of the game needs to work for OG Xbox One for example, and I feel as though in 1-2 years theyāll end up dropping support for certain modes but stuff like 4v4 would always be playable, that sort of thing.
Summary: Weāll know more later on. Nobody knows limitations for the Engine. Forge will show what it is capable of, as would DLCās and/or new modes later on.
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Reason i said that is because people said since it uses the same animations its the same engine even with the bugs
To my knowledge animations arenāt too relevant to a gameās engine. animations are just mocapped and coded in like anything else, thatās like saying its the exact same engine because the maps basically.
Edit: to put this into perspective, the recent Battlefield 2042 had worse animations than the last few games prior, and theyāve obviously been using the same engine (frostbite) for many years.
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I really hope people know that game engines do more than just graphics, right? Itās also very difficult taking old engine tech and porting it over to new operating systems and console architecture.
Making a new engine allows the devs to be a lot more potentially flexible with what they can add and change in the game without a lot of legacy debt attached to it. A simple example would be Destiny 1 vs Destiny 2 and how long it would take Bungie to change something for testing purposes.
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Itās a heavily re-worked Halo 5 engine that was itself a heavily reworked Halo 4 (that was formerly Halo 3). Similar to how Gambryo became āCreation Engineā for Bethesda, its extensively reworked and then re-named. Itās not new.
The toolset is so bad that they considered using UE4 for a time according to Jason Schreier. Destiny has (or had) the same problems with the Reach version they use (Saber? Tiger? Idk), mainly its takes forever to make ālive serviceā related changes.
And yes one of the devs confirmed theres still legacy Blam! code in it (real money says its the aim assist systems).
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And itās funny that these new engines Todd bragged about still have bugs from game bryo. I know engines can matter, but I think youāre right. They arenāt going to make or break a game (unless the engine is really bad), the game will do that itself.
Halo Infinite uses a modified version of the existing Blam! engine, as proven by its dev tools as well as 343iās own admission. Ease-of-use seems to have been their only focus, though even that is debatable considering how itās apparently a Herculean feat to change the store.
Engines are important (basically the skeleton of the game) but the reality is that the engine itself rarely amounts to anything. Rockstar been using the same engine for decades, as have Bethesda, so its all important in terms of what is technically possible but what is technically possible is almost worthless because what the game is is what matters.
Lets just say that Infinite (for the sake of argument) is capable of doing crazy stuff weāve never seen beforeā¦ Ok, so where is that? Why did they not do anything remotely new or interesting with super duper special engine of theirs? They said that it would be easier to add stuff (like modes for example) yet again we have not seen any such examples of that so far.
Now I could be completely wrong, maybe the Slipspace engine (pretty sure its just the Halo 5 engine but modified a bit) is capable of insanely ambitious and mindblowing stuff and 343i havenāt been able to capitalize on it, but it wouldnāt be too difficult to talk about that more in a documentary or whatever so I just think it was marketing PR nonsense they use for practically every new game (all the past Halos as well I might add) and that the engine is irrelevant.
/rant
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Its a common misconception that ānewā engines are instantly better than updating old, or even somewhat common. While in truth most game engines are merely revamped versions of old ones. Thereās not much point reinventing the wheel, especially if youāre intending to use it to make a series of games that are meant to feel the same.
Iām not sure baout UE4 and UE5, but the older UE engines also shared code. I wouldnāt be surprised if UE5 is actually still running old UE cold even. The difference with UE is designed to be general use, licensable engine, so it probably has more effort put into its various versions than inhouse engines, which are just trying to be āgood enoughā to make the next engine in the studioās franchise.
Typically when a dev says they have a new engine, they mean they overhauled their existing one. This is also usually largely in reference to the graphics engine which is part of the overall game engine, making their statement not entirely false. Obviously the graphics capabilities are vastly superior to that than what the Blam! engine could do in CEās time. How theyāve managed their tools to actually create content is another matter, but reinventing the wheel here is both costly and sacrifices the training, expertise, and documentation of the older version.
The engine however isnt really meant for rapid development, especially not with microsofts usual quality assurance tests they do. I donāt think any previous halo title did major ui changes post launch (except for MCC itself but its UI is in Unreal from what i recall). Redoing the entire store is unfortunately not an easy task. 343 for some reason thought their launch model was a good one, and making it so they could change to an individual buy model isnāt something they can just snap their fingers and do.
That isnāt to say Iām defending 343, rather just trying to provide some perspective. Honestly infiniteās a mess, and perhaps their overhauls of the old engine did give some trouble.
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As much as I want to believe they didnāt want a new Engine, they probably needed to make one anyway.
Infinite was meant to be the flagship game for Xbox Series S, selling the console.
If Infinite looked kinda poor on the Series S then itās a huge āmehā thing. In the end, the Halo through history has been made to sell the Xbox.
true that but too bad there aināt 1 good dev on 343 lol
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Not really. A new engine is mainly for todays and future hardware. Take UE4 for an example, itās defiantly held itās weight and could still do good with todays hardware. Now take a look at UE5, that will be around probably longer than UE4, which has been for almost 10 years. Who knows what 343i plans are but I doubt they made a new engine for one game and one game only. Then again, who knows how long ago this engine was final. Was the 6 or so years of Halo Infinites development actually spent on the game itself, or is that counting the time spent developing the engine also? Who knows.
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I mean, a necessary one if you want it to take advantage of Series X|S hardware, let alone newer computers. Itās not just for graphics, itās for interfacing with better machines.
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If you think the UE4 to UE5 engine improvements are remotely similar with Halo 5ās engine to Infiniteās, then that is extremely optimistic. It typically just means (at best) graphical improvements and rarely ever results in anything else but less features and less content.