Should/Will Naughty Dog use a new engine for PlayStation 5?

[SuperBoss]

Considering the technical prowess of The Last of Us Part II, and how it looks like a next gen game, it doesn't seem like they need a new engine anytime soon.

If they make a game with wildly different engine requirements I'm sure they'll make a new one. But what they've got is excellent.

 

[MarsipanRumpan]

Last of Us Part II is running on their "updated" engine I remember. It was stated during Last of Us Part II announcement. Im guessing they can squeeze out a whole lot more with it than they could on PS4.

 

[Wackamole]

I'll let Naughty Dog think about that.

 

[Mitchman1411]

Naughty Dog has been using the same engine since the PS3 gen and while the TLOU 2 looked incredible. I feel like Naughty Dog could do a lot more with a new next gen engine. What do you guys think?

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The engine is constantly being enhanced, dropping an engine and creating a new is a monumental task. So yes, they will enhance it for next gen, as they always do, but not create a new engine.

 

[Ravelle]

You are mixing up hyper realism with photo realism. Hyper realism is the kind of style games like Uncharted 4, The Last of Us 2, God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn or Spider-Man go for. It is a form of stylization. Photo realism is what you are referring to and what can lead to an uncanny valley effect.

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Ah gotcha!

 

[FFNB]

Nah. I mean, they've been iterating and improving their in house engine since Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. They're going to do the same for the PS5. Although, I suppose it really boils down to what the needs of their next project are. If it requires a new engine, then I'm sure they'll build a new one from scratch, but that is such a massive undertaking, and the engine they have is damn good for the types of games they want to make. But usually, developers don't want to scrap something they've iterated on for years, and have learned the ins and outs of. I have no doubt their PS5 engine will be a significant improvement over their PS4 engine, which was an improvement over their PS3 engine.

 

[Triggerhappytel]

Definitely. There was probably a reason Kojima didn't pick their engine.

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Probably because Decima was already optimised for open-world development and thus suited his needs better at the time?

But anyway, it's all pointless speculation and to try to use it as an attempt to throw shade at Naughty Dog is ridiculous.

 

[Patitoloco]

Definitely. There was probably a reason Kojima didn't pick their engine.

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Kojima has explained it so many times I can't believe it still needs to be brought up.

The reason Kojima picked the Guerilla Games engine is because they gave him the full source code without restrictions on his first visit, which Kojima appreciated greatly and was the easier thing for them after losing all the tech they had from the Fox Engine. That + the engine was already prepared for open world games, the type of game Kojima wanted to do.

AKA not "lol Naughty Dogs engine bad"

 

[dgrdsv]

There is no such thing as a "new engine" these days. Everything is a degree of evolution of previous technology.

In case of ND, the engine is fine. They need to rebuild their art pipelines though to make the art more physically correct and switch from hand painted textures to photogrammetry - this alone will provide tangible gains in quality even without any tech changes - and there will obviously be changes to accommodate new rendering features of PS5 GPU.

 

[Modest_Modsoul]

As long it's functional & plays well.

They also need to give options for Performance or Resolution for their PS5 games...

 

[Muitnorts]

It's not like they're using an engine like Gamebryo that has felt outdated for years. They will likely continue to update their engine for their needs and put out cutting edge games.
TLOU2 is almost definitely the most impressive looking game on consoles right now and it's not built on what ND have described as a completely new engine compared to Drake's Fortune.

They just need to carry on doing what they're doing honestly.

 

[Spish!]

Naughty dog games would look amazing on unreal engine 4 see video below



sony and epic seem friendly lately perhaps they will let them use their engine

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There are already Sony first party games that use UE4, but that's really besides the point. That Mario/Kite demo hybrid you posted is running on an OCed GTX 980ti. So 7.7 teraflops and 393 GB/s memory bandwidth in addition to all sorts of architectural improvements over an ancient 1.84TF 176 GB/s GCN GPU.

Even then the demo itself is only "alright" since throwing a lot of non-interactive foliage on screen is a trick even base PS4 can do at 1080p; which I assume this demo is running at based off the comments. There are actual PS4 games that offer impressive foliage and scale in addition to interactivity, complex character models and materials, cloud and atmospheric effects, and motion blur and other effects. Also the large complex environments of TLOU2 are more impressive to me than a lot of these empty valley areas common in open world games.

I'd actually be surprised if UE4 could offer any major advantages over Naughty Dog's highly tailored and optimized PS4 pipeline.

 

[TheRulingRing]

Yes, so cartoonish

DG photo courtesy of Sebmugi

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Yeah God of War and Days Gone are the two exceptions I was also thinking if. I hope more of them go in that direction.

God of War showed that a photorealistic target doesn't have to come at the expense of art design.

 

[AllBizness]

Naughty Dog's engine is fine for the kind of games they make, I'm more interested in seeing if any other 1st party will create a new engine built on PS5.

 

[xFiona]

You cannot compare a cutscene to the gameplay graphics.

Apart from Joel not being manually lit by hand in a way that makes him look best, he also won't have shaders and textures and geometry that are as expensive as the ones used in the cutscenes.

In engine cutscenes are so meticulously crated in AAA games, particularly in NDs games. It surprises me that people aren't so aware of this.

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I am aware. Some are not.

 

[APOEERA]

Part of me wants to see Naughty Dog license its engine to other developers with the caveat that it's PlayStation exclusive. I'm not sure though what the results would be, but it would be a great way for Naughty Dog (and Sony) to make money. At the same time, I don't really want the engine to be in every third party PS5 game either.

 

[RogerL]

Engines are not just things you can hotswap. There are a ton of stories about how a mandatory switch to Frostbite really hamstrung a lot of development at EA, especially for BioWare.

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One thing for sure is there are way too many variables to claim one way or another how an engine would either hinder or assist in the development process. BioWare had massive issues with Frostbite with 3 games, same story with Amy Hennig's star wars game.
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This is really one of the most understated comments in this thread. A good carpenter doesn't blame his tools. A great carpenter will specialize tools for the job, not to make it faster, but to do the best job with minimal work involved.

Looking back in retrospect, that policy almost ruined the EA brand entirely going into this generation: removal of all titles on Steam, forcing studios to use Frostbite to alleviate royalties, and succumbing to sequelitis. (An honorable mention goes to almost losing that Star Wars license with Battlefront 2, but I think gaming as a whole has a RMT issue that needs to be addressed.)

I'm glad that they eventually came to their senses and decided that picking the right tool for the job was the better outcome and let the developers have more freedoms in making the games.

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I do not think EA ever mandated use of Frostbite, if they did how come NHL is still on Ignite?
They knew they had a great rendering engine, with great streaming (imagine if Star Wars Jedi: Fallen order had been on Frostbite - those streaming pauses, there would have been no end of complaints about how useless the engine was. But now it was Unreal 4 - then it is kind of ok as that is a usual problem...?)

EA probably offer some extra money if a developer used Frostbite and added to its features.
- Things like: DA:I had horses, Battlefield 1 later got horses.

To me it looks like Bioware got some extra resources to develop using Frostbite - carrot instead of whip.
But it looks like they went off tangent for years, then building the actual games in a very short time (guessing EA treated to cancel some of those long running development projects...)

But now we have Unreal 5, shouldn't EA change?
We have only seen glimpses of Frostbite for PS5/XSX, and we do not really have Unreal 5 yet...
Frostbite is often the engine that is first to deliver new features in actual games.

EA back to release on Steam is probably Valve as much, they took a premium for their service...
That was kind of OK while most games were physical sales with their own overhead.
When most game sales went digital then EA is big enough to handle their sales themselves, after all you can put your game zip on a generated shop webpage...

 

[reclaimerzzzzz]

I do not think EA ever mandated use of Frostbite, if they did how come NHL is still on Ignite?
They knew they had a great rendering engine, with great streaming (imagine if Star Wars Jedi: Fallen order had been on Frostbite - those streaming pauses, there would have been no end of complaints about how useless the engine was. But now it was Unreal 4 - then it is kind of ok as that is a usual problem...?)

EA probably offer some extra money if a developer used Frostbite and added to its features.
- Things like: DA:I had horses, Battlefield 1 later got horses.

To me it looks like Bioware got some extra resources to develop using Frostbite - carrot instead of whip.
But it looks like they went off tangent for years, then building the actual games in a very short time (guessing EA treated to cancel some of those long running development projects...)

But now we have Unreal 5, shouldn't EA change?
We have only seen glimpses of Frostbite for PS5/XSX, and we do not really have Unreal 5 yet...
Frostbite is often the engine that is first to deliver new features in actual games.

EA back to release on Steam is probably Valve as much, they took a premium for their service...
That was kind of OK while most games were physical sales with their own overhead.
When most game sales went digital then EA is big enough to handle their sales themselves, after all you can put your game zip on a generated shop webpage...

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There are 4 articles on Kotaku about the development issues all 3 BioWare games and Amy Hennig's Star Wars game faced; Frostbite was listed as one of the contributing issues in all of them.

This is a quote from the Star Wars article.

There was the engine, Frostbite, which had never been used to make a third-person action-adventure game. In the video game world, an "engine" is a collection of code that is reused across games, often including basic, boring features like physics simulators, graphics renderers, and animation systems. For the past half-decade, EA has mandated that all of its studios use the Frostbite engine, which was designed by the EA studio DICE in Sweden to make Battlefield games.

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Here is another from Anthem's article

Frostbite is a video game engine, or a suite of technology that is used to make a game. Created by the EA-owned Swedish studio DICE in order to make Battlefield shooters, the Frostbite engine became ubiquitous across Electronic Arts this past decade thanks to an initiative led by former executive Patrick Söderlund to get all of its studios on the same technology. (By using Frostbite rather than a third-party engine like Unreal, those studios could share knowledge and save a whole lot of money in licensing fees.) BioWare first shifted to Frostbite for Dragon Age: Inquisition in 2011, which caused massive problems for that team. Many of the features those developers had taken for granted in previous engines, like a save-load system and a third-person camera, simply did not exist in Frostbite, which meant that the Inquisition team had to build them all from scratch. Mass Effect: Andromeda ran into similar issues. Surely the third time would be the charm?

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Respawn's EA game was announced in 2016 and they weren't bought out until 2017, maybe that's why Frostbite wasn't forced on them.

I can't explain how NHL is on a different engine but there definitely was a mandate that made BioWare's life harder on the creation of their 3 games this gen.

 

[julia crawford]

Well the best thing would be to have an engine so well modulated that they can update it infinitely over time with little tech debt. That's probably the dream.

 

[the-pi-guy]

The real answer is they will update what they need to and keep what they can.

 

[Nine_Ball]

It does seem pretty dated, graphically. A bit cartoony.

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You're a funny guy.

 

[ApeEscaper]

No. They already take too damn long to release a game in the first place

 

[blastprocessor]

Why would you throw away an engine that:
- Has tools familiar with the team
- Has so many man years of development
- Have the source of what's important to them
- Can be upgraded for next gen
- Mature
- Performant

 

[blonded]

Agree, it's starting to show its age. They should scrap the whole thing and make all their future games using RPG Maker VX Ace.

 

[eso76]

Pretty sure it's been enhanced with every new game, which is what they will keep doing, especially seeing how they consistently put out the best graphics around.

One significant change they might have to make sooner or later is the way lighting is handled: tlou1 and 2 rely *heavily" on baked everything and look great also thanks to it.
But as soon as they decide they need a day/night cycle, baked lighting isn't going to cut it.

 

[cooldawn]

Not an expert at all but their current engine would surely be specifically to run traditional HDD technology and a really poor CPU. Surely a new approach, designed around a fast CPU and brand new I/O, would be measurably better than incremental improvements?

I mean Unreal Engine 5 certainly wiped the slate clean. If a third-party tools developer can do it, partnering with Sony themselves, it stands to reason Naughty Dog and any other first-party developer can do it too.

 

[Spork4000]

Naughty dog games would look amazing on unreal engine 4 see video below



sony and epic seem friendly lately perhaps they will let them use their engine

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Nintendo should hire the man who made this.

 

[Gitaroo]

Yeah, I think is it is more about understand the tools you are using when it comes to ND. As DF analysis said, there isn't any new tech unlike uncharted 1 to 2 and 3, which make sense since last gen, tech like SSAO, SSS, etc were added through out the generation but this gen RT is the only new tech that makes a significant difference which is too demanding for current consoles. Its better for ND to upgrade their engine than to switch to a new engine or even ue5.

 

[DavidDesu]

I'm sure their current one will evolve and upgrade. Results of TLOU2 look better than just about anything else out there besides the Unreal 5 demo so I think they're good.

 

[SaberVS7]

How many games have you shipped, OP? How much do you know about Engines and Engine Development? Have you used the development tools of ND's engine and have any specific criticisms of it? Can you tie any specific issues with any of their games directly to the engine in specific detail?

I am going to pose these questions in every thread with a title to the effect of "[Developer] should Do X/Y/Z (with) [Engine]" I see from now on.

 

[RogerL]

There are 4 articles on Kotaku about the development issues all 3 BioWare games and Amy Hennig's Star Wars game faced; Frostbite was listed as one of the contributing issues in all of them.

This is a quote from the Star Wars article.


Here is another from Anthem's article


Respawn's EA game was announced in 2016 and they weren't bought out until 2017, maybe that's why Frostbite wasn't forced on them.

I can't explain how NHL is on a different engine but there definitely was a mandate that made BioWare's life harder on the creation of their 3 games this gen.

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Counterpoint Bioware

EA never forced BioWare to use the Frostbite engine

Former BioWare general manager Aaryn Flynn claims it was BioWare's own decision to use Frostbite for Mass Effect: Andro…

www.vg247.com

My point about Respawns Starwars was that it had issues it would not have had with Frostbite, but that it kind of is overlooked as it is Unity 4. Engines have their pros and cons.

NHL is still using Ignite because the team wants to.

Forcing decisions down on developers/artists will not work, but not all developers will be there at the time decision is made. Bioware mismanaged their projects (Andromeda was going to be generated universe like No Mans Sky, no suprise that would become a problem in an engine that uses baked streaming chunks) - that is the real reason they had problems, but it easier to blame something external...

 

[WhiteRabbitEXE]

For a gaming enthusiast forum, Era/the old place never did actually figure out, well, just about anything about game engines.

 

[Glio]

I think people give too much importance to engines.

 

[MatrixMan.exe]

Scrapping their current engine for a new one, whether that's an internally built or externally sourced engine would be a massive undertaking.

Not only is it a ton of work but it could fuck up their dev pipeline massively. They'll iterate and upgrade it just like they did when transitioning to PS4, which is still a huge body of work in and of itself.

I don't know how anyone can come off of The Last of Us Part II and claim they need to change their engine anyways. Ridiculous.

For a gaming enthusiast forum, Era/the old place never did actually figure out, well, just about anything about game development.

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Fixed that for you.

 

[Mitchman1411]

Pretty sure everyone knows that the engines continue to get updated. But as stated above, there comes a time where the original coding can hold you back. It's probably been about 15 years since the debut. They themselves might be bumping into their own limitations as coding changes, improves and become more efficient.

But maybe they had the foresight to make an engine that is future proof.

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Continues improvement and in some cases, rewriting of weaker or outdated parts, is common.

 

[Gitaroo]

They should look into adding RT support plus start using tessellation, rdna2 is much better at tessellation than GCN1 architecture. Everything else is super solid as they are.

 

[xFiona]

You're a funny guy.

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Thanks. You are a hoot yourself. We connect.