12 Awesome First Person Shooters coming in 2018 and their technology

Interested in engines of Best Platformer games of 2017? See this post!

I just watched "12 Awesome First Person Shooters coming in 2018" and was interested to know what technology each of these titles is utilizing.

About an hour later, I finally know. Two of them use Unity and look great!

1. GTFO (Unity )
2. Atomic Heart (Unreal)
3. Overkill’s The Walking Dead (Unreal)
4. Hunt Showndown (CryEngine)
5. Scorn (Unreal)
6. Metro Exodus (4A)
7. Witchfire (Unreal)
8. Far Cry 5 (Dunia)
9. Hell Let Loose (Unreal)
10. Ready Or Not (Unreal)
11. System Shock 2018 (Unreal)
12. Reborn (Unity )

 

I used to love clssic 2D FPS but since VR i cant get the same immersion as before ;/
That said I need to play Metro, loved the first two

 

Thanks for sharing. I've only had a quick flick through but have to say that that's some impressive stuff - particularly the character shot at 3:20 (The Walking Dead), just wow!

 

Yeh Metro looks awesome! Kudos to the 4A team.

 

I'm psyched for System Shock, My guess is that I won't find it even close as fun as Shock 1 and 2 were, but I'm weak when it comes to sci-fi action games in this style so needless to say, it will be interesting to see how well they do!

 

You should like Prey then.

Thanks for the detective work. I was confused because I thought the System Shock reboot used Unity, but they switched:

https://www.pcgamesn.com/system-shock-remastered/system-shock-remastered-unreal-engine-4

 

Thanks for the article, that was an interesting read. I had no idea System Shock started as an Unity project!

 

Is really unity performing worse on console than ue? Isn't that up to the dev's?

 

The gameplay trailer for Metro is much more inspiring than that clip. Definitely getting it. Huge fan.

Witchfire seems like it might be fun. Very pretty graphics as well. Of course, we are talking about the guys who made the Ethan Carter game, which was easily one of the best looking games of its time, and that was on UE3 (or whatever that engine was called). I think they just use photogrammetry for everything to produce that level of detail?

Probably most of the prettiest games I've seen have been on cryengine, but A4 and the Ethan Carter guys buck that trend.

 

Yes and no.

If the title plays to a specific engine's strengths it will likely perform better on that engine. Unity and UE4 excel at different things.

If the title needs significant source code access you can get it in Unity or UE4 but it's still typically an expensive and invasive procedure regardless of how much source needs changing, and at that point it's neither UE4 or Unity but obviously custom work.

So basically the argument is: what performs better out of the box? In this case, Unity performs better out of the box for typical generic titles as UE4 is a bit too expensive out of the box for console. You need to cut a lot of cruft. In Unity's case you need to figure out what cruft to add. So they'll meet in the middle.

Pre SRP I would put money on UE4 performing better with everything turned on, but worse with SRP involved. Script wise it's a no brainer - C++ is faster if the developer is actually competent.

Honestly, I'd be happy to use UE4 or Cryengine or Unity, depending on a project's needs. My current project is easier to complete in Unity. Not sure I would be able to complete it in UE, so there's that.

In the end what performs better really is down to what the project needs and how much money you'll throw at it, if you assume time = money.

 

All I'm taking from this is "in 2018 you're way over your head".. The level of detail on some of them are frankly ridiculous, some of the props probably took a week and you'll bypass them in about three seconds.

If this level of quality is the defacto standard for upcoming releases, umm top down it is.. LOL!.

 

How often I feel this way. It seems photogrammetry is taking over -- which is awesome, but kind of sucks for little guys just learning how to sculpt trash cans and twigs.

 

As much as I hate to sound like one of those false prophets, I think there's no alternative to hardcore procedural generation (especially offline, as a workflow tool) for indies that want to stay somewhere on the rear horizon of AAA games, particularly in terms of scale. It's got a lot of difficulties to overcome to be anywhere near complete as an approach to creating game worlds, but I can't see any alternative unless indies want to run headfirst into an exponential wall of resource investment.

Being a bit of an artist myself I appreciate the craft, but it's always struck me that there is something fantastically wrong about spending even 1-2 hours to craft some tiny bit of environmental art, when each screenful can contain hundreds of items and each minute of gameplay can contain tens of screenfuls of art. I think that given the likelihood that games will be, almost as a rule, bigger and more detailed going into the future, it's not enough to simply tweak efficiencies by using better tools, trying to get a little bit faster or maybe re-use some assets here and there. Using normal methods, even if you halve the time that it takes to make a given bit of art (which is already a bad hypothesis given that art will continue to get more detailed), not only is it going to be a case of diminishing returns but the overhead of creating thousands and thousands of items individually is going to remain.

I think you have to start at the beginning and look at art as a cohesive body of information, made of pieces that relate to one another to a greater or a lesser extent, and try to figure out what are the rules that allow you to extrapolate from one piece of information to a new one in a way that does not disfigure the structure of the information body, and to formulate the range and type of differentiality that allows something to be unique but still fit into the stylistic set.

Because of that I'm actually not really excited about photogrammetry, because (if you didn't have to create it yourself), it's basically a way to reduce work by reducing flexibility to near-zero, which I think is a bad start. You don't actually achieve control of something fundamentally complex, you just copy it from the world in whatever way the world decided to instantiate it. I think it's something of a dead end for games, unless you are able to apply to it the sort of software that would enable you to create something pretty great from scratch anyway.

Anyway, I'm working on procedural tools for my game. Planets, asteroids and spaceships are on the menu right now. If I don't succeed, I'll probably just stick to text games so that I can have a life.

 

Another way of looking at that list of games for 2018 is which ones will have large worlds and which will not...

So when is Unity's improved terrain and built in large world support coming?

 

Well, there is one thing that can't be automated -- making the game fun.

 

One thing I'll point out (you didn't contradict it, just didn't address it): AAA studios are using it too, extensively in some cases.

Star Citizen (we can debate their AAA status, but fact is they've acquired $150+ Million) is using it for their planets.

The AC series uses it to build their cities.

Mass Effect Andromeda spent 3/5 years planning to use it for hundreds of planets, with a disconnect coming because only one team out of all of them could use World Machine correctly.

So they're using it too.

That aside, I definitely agree with this. Procedural generation and systems are the answer.

Of course as already mentioned there's no guarantee that this makes a game "fun," but that's almost completely unrelated--whether a game is fun or not has almost nothing to do with the amount or detail of content, which is the majority of what procedural generation is concerned with.

Something else this makes me wonder about: mocap. I've always imagined mocap as the gold standard of animation. But in reality, how is it all that different from photogrammetry? Aren't they basically the same idea, an attempt to brute-force fidelity?

 

It's not clear that this is the case, although it's something that I'd prefer to do myself.

That's right, in fact one of the biggest problems right is that AAA studios are developing and taking up procedural technology at a much faster rate than indies. It's just another thing where indies get complacent, and the gulf increases even more.

But the thing about procedural generation is that the quality and volume of the output content is not linearly related to the amount of funds or human resources you put in it - at this early stage it's probably nearly the case but I think in not too long the ability of AAA studios to extract an advantage by applying money to developing procedural tools will reduce. Not just because of the nature of the technology, but I think that also many powerful online resources will emerge like Artomatix that are interested in providing cheap subscription access to stuff that people would not be able to develop on their own.

Of course AAA will always be ahead of indies in every way, but I think part of the value that indies provide is to be able to experiment ahead of the curve, and with procedural stuff I think we have sort of failed to make the most of the opportunity so far.

 

Calling indies complacent when it comes to procgen when procgen has dominated the indie scene for the past few years is pretty silly.

 

At least in terms of the games that I am interested in, I think it's been done wrong. It has been used as a way to promise 'infinite content' when that content is often not really worth playing. I don't like the idea of procedural generation being used as a way to achieve infinite anything, because anything that is infinite is de facto boring and meaningless. A story without an ending is meaningless. It's a good signal I think of a game that's going to be a huge waste of time, and not only that, it's a valueless goal IMO to even want to create a game that people don't stop playing.

I also think that too many interesting procgen tools and tricks have come from AAA games. Sure they have money, but I don't think the indie scene is lacking talented, creative people which is what you need to develop procedural stuff. I think possibly what has happened is that indies tend to lack the kind of discipline and direction that fulfills short-term goals (10x - 100x increase in art production speed/efficienty for example) instead of skipping directly to OMG infinite universe MMO. The two most promising projects that I know of, No Mans Sky and Limit Theory, succumbed to lack of clear direction and lack of discipline (IMO).

My favourite idea of a litmus test for procedural generation is to create a city or a town that people find interesting to explore (in my case, I will be making a spaceport). The reason why I think this is because

• A city has a natural structure and hierarchy, and if your procedural generation algorithm is lacking structure, or is driven by perlin noise or some other excuse, it will fail to produce anything interesting in this regard;
• A city is something that grows out of a collection of purposes, not just in its physical structure but in the set of interactions that occur within it over a specific amount of time. To create an interesting one, you are forced to create a set of real goals that drive the agents that move around inside it, and to allow those agents and the pursuit of their goals to shape it over time in every way.
• A city is FINITE. It has a focal point, a center, that doesn't exist anywhere else, and each place relates to that focal point in a specific, meaningful way.

I think that if it is not possible to achieve a procedurally generated city or town that's worth exploring, it's certainly not worth creating an infinite amount of them. If the No Mans Sky devs had playtested a single interaction with aliens in isolation, they would certainly have known that there was something missing. The problem is that it seems to me that it is perceived that multiplying it in number somehow increases its value, when that actually has little (if any) inherent value.

 

Remember how P.A.M.E.L.A. quite frequently was mentioned here pre-release as the posterchild for "fancy looking Unity games"? I found it sad to read that apparently they're struggling hard with Unity bugs at the moment:

http://steamcommunity.com/gid/103582791454697024/announcements/detail/1478734349151967364

 

I went through that pain in my previous job as well, let me tell you that story...

I don't remember what exactly it was why we had to upgrade from Unity 5.1 to a newer version, but I was assigned the task to take care of it.

I tested 5.2, which didn't work at all, constantly crashing, very slow. Submitted lots of bug reports, reported issues through their beta channel.

Several months later, I tested 5.3. Most obvious crash issues were fixed, but performance was a lot slower than in 5.1. Our problem was, we had defined performance budgets with 5.1 and a lot of content had been produced already, following these budgets. But this content ran with half the framerate in 5.3.

At this point, we felt we're never able to release this game if Unity isn't able to provide a release that isn't crashing and isn't utterly slow. We started to think how we can accelerate this process. We thought about getting the source license and fix it our self or buying their premium support. We went with the premium support.

When 5.4 beta started, I continued reporting performance issues to UT, through their beta channel and premium support. After about 6 months, they finally fixed the performance issue. At this time, Unity 5.4 was only a bit slower than 5.1, still very uncool but at this time we weren't all that picky anymore.

5.4 seemed like a robust release to us. Our game went in open beta, but it turned out it was crashing a lot. The top two crashes where caused by Unity trying to allocate memory, which caused an "out of memory" crash.

I had to investigate these issues as well. It turned out we had leaks in our code and Unity was leaking memory in various places too. It took a few weeks for us to fix our own leaks and Unity's premium support was of help here as well. However, it turned out to be extremely frustrating to work with UT on these engine leaks.

We had to spoon-feed these issues to Unity's premium support. It was so complicated to convince them there are memory leaks in their engine, even though various profiler software we use indicated there are issues. It took months for UT to fix these leaks.

At this point, our game only crashed randomly. Again with an "out of memory" error. We found out it's during asset deserialization of a ScriptableObject, which loaded just fine a minute earlier. Unity tried to read an array, but its length was "garbage" and Unity tried to allocate eg 2gb of memory and then crashed.

This issue was extremely difficult to debug, because it occurred randomly. Sometimes the game crashed after 5 minutes, sometimes after 5 hours. I also wasn't of help anymore, beside of testing their potential fixes, because this crash was on the engine side. We couldn't do anything than waiting for Unity to fix these issues.

Every few weeks we got a new Unity version that we could test if the issue persists. I installed the new version, ran our automated test on the device and waited for a crash. Then reported the issue back to premium support. After several months of them not being able to fix the issue and I switching projects inside the Company, my work-mate took over that job.

After a few weeks, he found out that this issue is related to compressed asset bundles. Using uncompressed asset bundles does not cause Unity to run into this crash we want to get fixed for so long. He reported his findings to Unity and we switched to use uncompressed asset bundles. This caused our download size to explode, but at least it won't crash so often.

Even after finding out the crash is related to compressed asset bundles, UT wasn't able to fix this issue.

I left the company in the meantime, I don't know if they actually sorted out this problem, but I doubt it.

I still can't believe how many issues we experienced using Unity, I alone reported more than 200 bugs between just 2016-2017. It's a paid product that is broken in many places once you go a little deeper than tutorial stuff. Even throwing more money at UT by buying their premium support isn't a guarantee for a bug-fix.

Anyway, my conclusion is using Unity for a non-trival product can be extremely frustrating. Another learning is that a lot of developer time goes in dealing with Unity bugs, reporting those bugs and trying to find workarounds.

*mic drop*


Update, Feb 2018
I went to lunch with some of my former work mates recently and they told me the company switched to Unreal Engine for new projects. Unity Technologies just lost an entire games studio, perhaps due to their bug fiasco.

 

HOLY SHlT! I have no reason to believe other engines are vastly better, but still... that sounds like it indeed can ruin businesses. Makes me glad I never went fulltime gamedev.

 

We all know what Unity's new years resolution was then: less bugs

 

Unreal dominates (FPS). I am curious why. My guess is: it is longer in this Tripple AAA area. Second: it has top notch graphics capabilities. Third: it performs better. Or you can say: optimizing stuff is better in UE, for specific stuff (Maybe bcecause of C++ language).

 

This is the key right here. One of the reasons Boston is interesting because its streets were originally cow paths and horse trails radiating out from its center. Then you drop things like Backbay (a filied in swamp) into the mix and it makes it the place it is. London is amazing for similar historical growth quirks over a much longer time frame. No way to simulate this by simple means certainly.

 

Because there's an extremely high quality MP FPS framework / game readily available made by Epic with a slurry of advanced materials / shader types / particles etc. available to you.. The likes of ARK was built atop of it.

A single artist created a very good looking FPS in space of a year and a half, if you re-skin the framework you can make a decent FPS in the time it would take you to go through Unity's space shooter project.

That's of course if you have some previous experience, Unreal today is better optimised although that swings in roundabouts.. Plus there's a metric ton of tutorials for that specific genre.

It's not exactly a surprise when in most cases you'd get by with just a re-skin and a bit of reverse engineering.

 

Looks like they're making "progress":
http://steamcommunity.com/games/427880/announcements/detail/1647623773702901821

 

I just read System Shock development has been halted, as they "took the wrong path" according to the CEO and founder of Nightdive Studios.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598858095/system-shock/posts/2115044?ref=backer_project_update

EDIT: Added video @Martin_H

 

Is there any reason companies like Capcom or Bandai Namco uses UE4 over Unity for things like fighting games? seeing as UE4 has like 6 frames of input lag by default shouldn't they be using Unity?

 

Sad to hear that . But thanks for the info.

 

Gotta admit in game it kinda falls apart graphically, also interesting.. Thanks for posting:

 

On the other hand Underworld Ascendant, a spiritual successor to Ultima Underworld and being developed by many of the original developers, is on track for this year. It's not a first person shooter (unless we're counting firing spells) but it is made in Unity.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/underworld-ascendant/underworld-ascendant-release-date

 

And as far as I know System Shock 3 is still on target, though I don't think it's this year.

 

Thanks for the link! I'm always interested to see commercial Unity games. Too bad that it doesn't seem to get released on Xbox.

 

Which game was this?

 

I believe it's this one:

 

I just found it on youtube and wanted to post it here, and was confused that it was already in your post. Seems like edits don't trigger @ mentions. But thanks for thinking of me!

It has an interesting Unity-positive quote in it about visual style of the two different vertical slices of the game.

 

Yeah that's true, I was also kind of surprised to hear that. Good for Unity! I only recently found that YongYea channel, but his videos are normally held in a very objective manner and provide lots of useful information with sources/references from where he got this information. He is doing a good job.

 

I just went through the "Best Platformer Games of 2017" list by IGN and looked up what engine those use.

1. Cuphead (Unity )
2. The end is nigh (Custom)
3. A hat in time (Unreal)
4. Hollow Knight (Unity)
5. Little Nightmares (Unreal)
6. Rain World (Unity )
7. Slime-San (Unity )
8. Sonic Mania (Retro Engine)
9. Sundered (Unity )
10. Super Mario Odyssey (Custom)

PS: Wasn't sure if I should create a new thread, but thought might make more sense to put it here.

 

Yeah... I started looking it up recently out of curiosity, watched a bunch of recent videos on it and I really don't like how it looks. Even in areas where you have something interesting to look at, the bad AA, the flickering speculars and reflections make it look kinda... cheap/junky. Kinda disappointing.

 

Almost two months later, they still wresting with issues...

http://steamcommunity.com/games/427880/announcements/detail/1652131807601450370

 

Let's hope they won't have to switch to UE4 and delay one year again because of issues like Bioshock remaster

 

What's the story behind Bioshock remaster?

 

https://www.polygon.com/2017/3/1/14784082/system-shock-reboot-unreal-engine

 

It seems they finally have an Unity build that works for them:

https://steamcommunity.com/games/427880/announcements/detail/1648761723394447385

 

I guess this is the reason the Unreal guys like the open source of that engine, how long did it take to fix this, I cant remember when I first heard about their problems

 

oooh i'm definitely liking the look of the end is nigh and rain world. waiting for the makers of Fran Bow to finish their next game as of late though.

*Edit Jeeze Louise - cuphead really cashed in, congrats to them.

 

Just saw the trailer of this, not Unity but its battleground is my own country of Sweden in the 80s. Not many games have Sweden as a theatre of War, instant buy

edit: The enemies look like ABB industrial robot spin offs

 

I mean, yay, but isn't it like a full year later?

 

Yeah it's been a while. Unity is the land where time stands still