Do AAA studios have a parent engine that is constantly under development, or is it always a fork of the parent engine for each project?
Some studios have an in-house engine they continue to develop. Whenever a game is set to launch using that engine, there's an established cutoff date after which they will no longer take new engine updates from the mothership unless those updates are crucial bug fixes, and even then the engineering teams will collaborate to bring over only the absolutely necessary changes. This is because game stability is the highest priority as we approach release. As the cert submission and launch date approach, all changes are disallowed by default unless vetted by the engineering team for impact and potential instability. This includes engine changes.
Imagine a major engine change in an engine with ongoing development like Call of Duty that completely changes how AI do their pathfinding - the new methods are much more efficient than before, but require new design principles and have a bunch of additional edge cases that need ironing out. Now imagine that this engine change gets pushed to this year's COD in beta a month before launch. QA suddenly logs a ton of AI pathfinding bugs in every level that has AI in it because of this engine-level change. The COD team could go back to the levels to fix all of the AI pathfinding issues, but that would be months of development and iteration time that they don't have because the game has to ship. The changes are simply too unstable to allow in to a game that close to release, so the team can't accept them.
[Join us on Discord] and/or [Support us on Patreon]
Got a burning question you want answered?
Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter
Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on BlueSky
Long questions: Ask a Game Dev on Tumblr
Frequent Questions: The FAQ
















