When UE4 game runs poorly, it is not because the engine, and when game Cryengine game runs poorly it’s because of the engine?
Yes it has and I don’t find very impressive that UE4 can run well game which looks like this.
No it doesn’t look bad, it looks very good. But not very good example, it is linear game with closed environments and very few NPCs at the same time, look at Ryse: Son of Rome very similar type of game (with more NPCs and more epic scenes).
UE4 is actually one of the best engine for photorealism, but mostly for interior scenes with static lighting.
No, what Victor Bocan said was very simplified.
Something about choosing engine from Daniel Vavra’s blog:
“We were looking for a complete package which included engine with good tools, especially for the terrain editing and scripting, AI, some pretty lighting and a sophisticated animation system. Some engines offer all of this in one package (Cryengine) and some rely on 3rd party solutions (Havok Vision). Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages. In the first example, you have everything under one roof for one price, but you might end up paying for something you don’t need. You also don’t have the choice to select the component that suits your game best if you’re not happy with the built-in one. In the second example, the initial price is lower and there is much more choice, but when you need everything anyway you may end up with a higher price, than the one for the complete package and lots of solutions from various providers may not work as well together. Even then there is a possibility that the option to choose different components to your liking will be more important than the final price.”
“We ended up with six different engines for evaluation and several middleware solutions for lighting, animations and AI. We were testing everything for two months (not long enough) and the final decision was not easy. I would have loved to work with the new younger developers like Unigine or Bitsquid, since one could easily see that they have a lot of talent and enthusiasm and what they provide looks great, but on the other hand we had to play it safe. Our game is going to be huge and we need proven and advanced tools from day one. I also liked the combo of Unreal + Enlighten lighting middleware which looks totally awesome (Enlighten was used in Battlefield 3), but it has its shortcomings when you have a game with realtime time of day changes and huge (huuuuge) environments.”
“In the end, we decided to go with CryEngine 3, because it has a little bit of everything we need. It has great tools for building large worlds, very impressive real-time lighting, great looking foliage, supports all the platforms we’re interested in, plus our lead artist worked at Crytek before leaving to come work with us, which is also a great advantage. For a game of our size and scope, CryEngine was (hopefully) the best choice. If we were developing a different game or had a different budget, our choice might have been different because all of the tech we tested had their strong points.”
I’m not saying developing on Cryengine was not problematic and maybe they encountered some problem and limitations of engine that made development difficult and resulted in the bad technical state of the game.
But development of game like Kingdom Come would by difficult on any engine and developing their own engine was not even an option.
You provided zero information that would suggest KCD would run good on UE4. I don’t have deeper knowledge about technical side of the engines, so I don’t know. But I’m quite interested in graphical side of engines and I can tell that I would look much worse (mainly because already mentioned dynamic global illumination).
