#gamebryo

Talking out of their ass implies that they are fully aware they’re charlatans and haven’t a clue what they’re talking about. Instead what we get is far worse: people who have never coded a line in their life but were told by Johnny Youtube (whose own coding experience basically amounts to copy and pasting scripts into Sony Vegas to get that epic minecraft intro to really shine) that the Gamebryo is all bad and stuffs because it can’t do the ladders.

And that’s ultimately the problem. People think that just because they understand the end result of something that they understand the process of its creation. Moreover they’re so incredibly stupid and believe that a game engine is some sort of magic sealed box with a wizard inside and if they’d just replace that wizard with a warlock or even a druid that all their problems would just disappear! I mean god, who knows how those game engines work right? Not like there’s people out there that made them. You just turn them on and they start producing models and shaders and all that. That’s why your friend Bill is totally going to make the best MMO about time travel ever (nevermind that Bill’s only experience is drawing circles in a book of graph paper and thinks Assassin’s Creed is real), and he told you that Unreal is the best engine ever and he knows what he’s talking about, he made a box fall on top of another box in it once.

Well, “overhype” is kind of a subjective state of being, really. It’s like I said about that Batman ask; Batman is obviously a very good game, I just came in to it after so much hype that it didn’t really live up to all of my expectations. But it’s still a good game!

I do agree, though, they’re probably in need of a new engine. But that’s not easy. Companies like Unity and Unreal make it look easy, but I remember Gabe Newell talking about how building the Source Engine was one of the most stressful things Valve had ever done, even now. He never wanted to put them through that again.

Which is why Source 2 mainly seems to be more of an incremental upgrade over Source 1, as opposed to an entire top-to-bottom rebuild. It’s got some new features, but by and large, it’s still just “The Source Engine But More Betterer.” A small, but none the less more modern step forward.

And, I mean, technically, Source Engine has been in use at Valve since 1996. It was originally just the Quake Engine, which Valve internally renamed Source (as in source code). When Half-Life 1 came out, that was a fork of Source that ended up being called “GoldSrc.” Valve continued to enhance and expand Source until it came time to publish Half-Life 2 in 2004, where it was officially renamed The Source Engine. Source 2 has a lineage dating back almost 20 years.

Valve was hardly the last. Lithtech, used by Monolith Productions, was the driving engine behind Shogo (1998), No One Lives Forever (2000), AVP2 (2001), No One Lives Forever 2 (2002), The Matrix Online (2005), F.E.A.R. (2005), Condemned (2006), Condemned 2 (2008), F.E.A.R. 2 (2009), Gotham City Impostors (2012) and even, supposedly, Shadows of Mordor (2014).

And I imagine that’s even harder for something like Bethesda, because they seem to specialize in hugely complex games. Their Radiant AI system is still probably one of the most complex in the business.

If all you want are better graphics, as both Valve and Monolith have proven, you can just write better graphics code. Compare the original 2004 version of Half-Life 2 to Portal 2 and you’ll see all kinds of visual enhancements like realtime lighting, cinematic physics, bigger environments, etc.