Could Unity have made Skyrim?

Hypothetically, could the developers of Skyrim have used Unity to make Skyrim, with the graphics and gameplay and everything remaining at least 97% the same from a player's perspective? Just asking if it is technically possible, how much money or how big of a team it would need is irrelevant to this question.

Any AAA game could've been used as an example for this question, such as Batman Arkham City or whatever you want to use.

 

I would say yes. But it would take alot to get the visual quality to that of skyrim.

 

Not al the AAA games can be used. Batman is a lot more confined in comparison to skyrim. Anyway this is a troll question.if you want to find out try it

 

In answer to the question "can Unity be used to make a AAA game", yes.

 

The real question is can you use unity to make a AAA game?

 

Dont see why not. Probably require alot of custom shaders

 

!the question was on skyrim, but then he changed it to AAA. Skyrim is AAA but not all AAA are skyrim. Batman is a lot more manageable. Skyrim has streaming terrain. In Batman normal scenes would probably cover your needs.skyrim on the other hand would mean quite a lot of work in order to get technical features integrated. It is not the same task by any measure. If you are talking about the rendering that.'s a very limited set of parameters and not what actually makes these titles AAA.

 

Yeah if you get the same developers who made those respective games - batman and skyrim - you could do them in unity. You'd need the unity source license to pull it off exactly though, and to optimise them so the speed is there.

Lets say you don't have the unity source license.

Then I would say - with the same developers - you will have identical looking games, but the performance will not quite be the same without a source license.

Having said this, I'm pretty sure you'd get 80-90% as close to the way those games are right now without a source license - after all they are mostly the way they are due to code and assets. The power of the engine isn't the primary reason those games are as good as they are - it is the development teams

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate for example, rage using id tech 5, but there's nothing in rage whatsoever that can't be done in unity if you're prepared to use a different texture pipeline. It may even look better without megatexture tech sadly

 

+1

(insert forgotten quote about picasso and his toolset here)

 

I don't see any reason why unity, given unlimited development resources, wouldn't be able to run a game like Skyrim.

Skyrim is very pretty, and has an enormous amount of content to it, but it's not using any alien technology. It's a game like most others before it, from a technical standpoint. A very pretty and awesome game, but nonetheless quite normal, as far as tech goes.

The 'wow' factor in skyrim comes not from it's novel use of some technology, but from the insane amount of developer talent that shows through in every aspect of it.

So yeah, if Bethesda were forced to use Unity for Skyrim, I'm quite sure they'd pull it off.

Cheers

 

A lot of amateur game developers believe that "AAA" games are made with amazing cutting-edge game engines that make developing a game easy.

The reality is that many "AAA" games are made with half-broken or legacy game engines that the developers don't have time to fix because they are on a tight schedule and need to ship their game on time, usually by Black Friday.

 

More than even I am realizing how important art and style are.

 

How well does unity work when a large team is making a single project with it?

 

Oh yeahhh

 

Let's take a dose of reality. All you people saying yes really mean "Yes, if you have near infinite resources". The real answer is NO. Unity cannot make skyrim. However, it can make many fun games, including RPG's that can be just as fun as Skyrim. It just can't do the level of detail and expanse that skyrim does. And there is no way any indie team or individual is going to produce the sheer amount of content that Skyrim contains.

 

No, the people saying 'Yes' mean that with the amount of resources spent on Skyrim, ie: millions, you could create something very similar in Unity.

Whether an Indie team could ever reproduce it was never the intent of the question.

 

And Skyrim was not created by an Indie team or Individual, so expecting it to suddenly be possible using Unity is being extremely hopeful/having completely unrealistic expectations of what a game engine provides for you.

Skyrim took a massive amount of resources to create, and so it stands that regardless of technology it would take a massive amount of resources to recreate.

 

The question is made almost meaningless by the statement that cost and manpower are irrelevant. With endless money and resources, and desktop/console target you can assume source license, and extensive collaboration with the Unity team itself are not unreasonable. Now, you might say that endless money is just silly and should be ruled out by common sense. But since we're talking specifically about Skyrim, it's entirely reasonable to assume lots of money and resources, together with a very high profile -to the point where all the same advantages are likely.

So the question without reference to real-world concerns is unanswerable. It's impossible to say what extremely talented people can do with something when they have the opportunity to really push it. Unless they've tried. With Unity, to my knowledge, they haven't.
The fact that they haven't might mean that doing Skyrim with Unity isn't practical or cost-effective (I don't know). But not possible? We don't know. Nobody has tried, and the reason is cost.

 

For one, even with a short development cycle the animations would be better with Unity.

3 cheers for Crossfade!

 

I can't help but wonder...why is this even a question?
Seems that by now it would have been settled....

 

The reason is "risk management."

I am reviewing technical proposals for a game development project with a projected budget in the $40M range. There are a few proposals from the Technical Director for the studio.

The first proposal is that I can spend a few million dollars on a well established game engine.e.g. Unreal, that the team is unfamiliar with, and take the hit on the ramp up speed to get familiar with it. The game engine has proven itself time and again on multiple AAA titles, the three million dollar license is not an issue, but there are a number of questions: "How long will my team take to ramp up on the toolset?" and "What hidden gotchas have other teams faced using this engine that they aren't talking about?" and "How much will we have to rework parts of the engine to shore up its shortcomings for this particular type of game?" being three of the primary questions I need solid, concrete answers to that I just cannot get without a lengthy due diligence period. We won't know, until we're in the heaviest part of development, and then it may be too late.

The second proposal is that a couple of million dollars are spent purchasing a source license to an unknown engine used mostly by small "indie" groups to produce games for iOS and Android, and... oh yeah, there was that LEGO thing made with it as well... um... no, too risky.

The third proposal is that the team uses the already established tool set that is badly in need of an overhaul, and a pipeline that limps along, but everyone is familiar with it, it has shipped two other AAA games already in a similar vein, we know all the issues, and it has proven itself. The risk is reasonably low because, deluded "gut instinct" or not, it has done the work before and it can be made to do the work again.

In fact, the second proposal option won't ever really come up from the Technical Director for a well established studio. He or she would not even consider it as an option. It would be a completely alien concept to them -- as foreign as proposing setting all the money on fire in a big heap until the great sky god pays attention and makes it rain copies of the game down on us.

New technologies, especially where real investment money is concerned, are adopted by degrees, not all at once.

 

I'd say no. If you pay attention to all the AAA open world games, you notice that they all create their own engines for their games. I'm thinking that's not a coincidence. To get the level of optimization you need to run on a console you need an engine that is built specifically for your game and nothing else. I'm thinking you could probably make Skyrim gameplay wise and graphic/sound wise in Unity but it would be more unoptimized.

 

Unity isent a option? i guess it could be option 3 but i cant think of three AAA games made with it.. i can only think of one thats in the works onless people just dont say they use unity?

You could just give me the $40 million and then ill run away to mexico never to be seen again

 

I'm pretty confident Unity was option 2 in JustinLloyd's example.

 

You're right - with enough money and resources, you could turn the following program into Skyrim:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. #include <stdio.h>
3. int main(int argc, char **argv)
4. {
5.    printf("hello world\n");
6. }
7.  

 

That's what I meant earlier. If people WERE churning out AAA titles with Unity, this discussion wouldn't be happening. As much as people say "Yeah, but you COULD"...whatever! Unless the people making the AAA titles are all crazy, and really don't have good, professional reasons for not using Unity.

Luckily, now more than ever is a GREAT time to be an Indie eh?

 

SOPA

 

squar enix is using unity for a new game for vita and ps3 (i think ps3) they are verry developed , also if this company was to buy(i take this is just hypothetical?) unity source would be alot cheaper i would think and some games look amazing, eg. Physynth looks as good as crysis 2 or other AAA, although it only has a small amount of textures etc, also if some one works for a game company that gets 40million dolars to make a game then they could learn unity in a day expecialy if there is a unity pro like you there.

Back on topic, i actualy think a indie could acheive the same results as Skyrim for much cheaper as they dont have a set relese date and can just take there time, they also are generaly smaller studios so not as manny licenses needed(taking they dont buy source).

 

'Fraid not. Learning new software is expensive, time-consuming, and counter-productive. As stated earlier, people stick to what works.

hehe!

 

Again: Indies are indies, not necessarily the best nor professionals. Secondly as stated eariler, Unity may (may not?) be unfit for the task of optimization of such a large game. Everyone knows terrain/occlusion is not Unity's strong suite. Sure, it's possible to modify Unity to their needs but this is also counter-productive.

 

To further post about what Justin meant, if I were the technical director of a 40 million project I wouldn't use unity. I may be evangelical about unity, but I'm sorry I would be really stupid to suggest a 40m project use unity, and here is why:

1. if I need a problem solved, now, and I'm using UDK I can pay my way through a 100% solution. It won't be pretty but I can buy a solution and hire my way to a solution, no matter what.

2. Unity will have to push their solution side of things to court the big developers. I understand there's paid support you can buy from unity, but it isn't documented well enough, there's no case studies where unity solved all these big problems for studio x and game y was shipped.

Basically until unity deal with that part of their business, unity can't really get recommended for the bigger budget stuff.

 

In every situation Justin said that they would have to learn a new engine, unity is by far the most user freindly.

@hippo, i think that if you came into a problem you could pay your way through it easily, with whatever the task in unity aswell. For me UDK and maby unreal would be completely out of the question, as i hear you have to close the thing and re open it for your scripts to take efffect? that would reduce productivity to much i would think Good luck on giving up smoking hope it goes well

 

To be bluntly honest, no professional developer gives a S***.

Do I get a proven result from the tools I choose? It is a simple question.

The start-up I currently consult for has a homegrown C++ engine that does not do even 20% of what we need graphically. For the past year I have evangelized Unity, proposed the switch to Unity, sold Unity, educated the stakeholders on the benefit of moving to Unity, briefed investors about why Unity and not some other engine, hired experienced Unity developers in to other roles, built demos to show off what Unity can do in the context of our current requirements, made sure our engineers are brought up to speed on Unity, pointed out every relevant news article that has come across my news feeds, ensured we bought the right licenses, spent extra hours finding solutions to issues we didn't anticipate to make sure the objections to Unity are minimized, and basically took the brave, and perhaps fooldhardy decision to move the development of our next iteration of our product line to Unity.

It has taken a year to move a small, agile start-up with a project costing just a few million dollars over to Unity. Imagine what it takes to move an entrenched team over.

 

But wouldent they need to move over to all the other engines aswell?

Now i can understand why you dont mind spending a few hundred dolars on a game that may just dissapear

 

Yes, but those other engines have proven themselves with the use of other peoples' money. Those other engines have industry recognition.

When client and interviewers ask me what my strongest skill is, I reply "spending money."

I am also lazy.

These statements do not mean what you think they mean unless you are a smart programmer and a smart entrepreneur.

It is also about ratios. What might be a lot to someone else might just be a few hundred bucks.

 

Nah, vegetation, particles, volumetric clouds are what has huge impact on overall graphic in Skyrim. Nothing of that can be done closely in Unity without source license.

And to reply on first post of OP, answer is quite simple. From technical view of game mechanic pretty much everything can be done, performance will not be as good, but as far as graphic are concerned just use one example scene from Skyrim and try to remodel everything you can as good as possible and try to keep exact proportions, mesh scales, particles and what not in your Unity scene. Then compare some screenshots together and you will see how close you can get. Thats how you will get answers on your question, asking on forums is quite ridicolous becouse probably every person is just speaking from top of his head without any proff which makes answers including my almost non-legitime.
As i said, make scene try to recreate game as best as you can, you dont have to recreate whole game world, just one simple scene that can be viewed from three different angles and you will see.

 

Hippocoder, JustinLloyd and others have hinted at this, and I'd like to ask them and others more experienced than myself this question:

What exactly keeps Unity from being seen as fit for AAA production? I would greatly appreciate more thoughts/insight on this.

I'm not talking about nitpicking over things like "What exactly IS AAA", or "AAA isn't the most important thing", etc. You guys know what I mean. I'm not saying at all that Unity has no value, or that it would even change my mind about what I use personally.

 

Not really they could make the same game but graphics probably wouldn't be top notch and it took like 5 years to create Skyrim unless 100 indies join up that kind of game would be impossible to make under 8-10years.

Maybe unity isn't used in AAA games but AAA Studios are using unity engine and in 2 years there will probably be few Unity AAA games,if you take a look at some of studios websites and go under JOBS most of them require basic knowledge of Unity.

 

This ^^^^^^^^^

 

Skyrim took 2 years and 100 developers, they ramped up from Fallout which was made with 60 and Oblivion which was 40. The fact is that if you see the work that has gone into every asset you will be amazed (especially the style consistency) and even then you have things like crappy animation blending, bugs and stuff. Why are they using what they are using is part history, part chance. When they were looking for an engine to do Oblivion Gamebryo had what they wanted, was pretty user friendly and they also got an SDK.

I have evaluated Gamebryo and it was very promising, at the time Unity wasn't even on PC, let alone a candidate.

What happens when you make a game proposal is you usually sell it with something along the lines of: Oblivion in Post-Apocalyptic America, so they ask you:

- what was that developed in,
- Gamebryo,
- so it can handle it
- yes
- that's it.

If you have something that has worked before, why would you risk millions? Game development is risky as it is, you don't need any more risk than necessary. You hire industry pros, interns do un-important stuff and your engine has a proven track record and even then all can go to sh1t!

Anyway pretty soon a decent triple aaa will pop up and it will give the required faith in Unity. Unreal didn't become an industry standard over night and it wasn't just their engine that did it, clever businesshad a lot to do with it also.

 

This ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

 

Quite a few years back we were ramping up a new project. The debate was: Write our own game engine, or perhaps choose one of the commercial ones.

At the time, we had the choice between what iD offered and.... er.... yeah, that's about it. We had what iD offered. Gamebryo, which had already been around for several years by that point, got in to the mix. I forget how, Possibly a chance meeting at GDC or a friend of a friend of an executive producer. We talked to the Gamebryo guys for several months, all the while building our own engine, because well... iD's engine did first-person-shooter games and we were making not-a-first-person-shooter-game.

After quite a few talks, of Gamebryo dropping by the offices, of the Gamebryo engineers working to produce a prototype of what we already had, of Gamebryo having some of our engineers do a boot camp at their offices, the big question, the one unanswered question still remained: "What other titles, just like ours, has your game engine done?"

And when the answer was "well... um... none, but we are working with a number of really big studios" we quietly waved goodbye and went back to building our own stuff.

Personally, I never did like the Gamebryo engine. I didn't like what it was, I didn't like what it became. Technically I didn't think it was all that great. That is not to say it was not, that is not to say that other people thought the same as me. Merely, I didn't like the engine.

But what it came down to was: "What games has your tool been used with that would cause me to add unnecessary risk to a multi-million dollar project just because you have something that is shiny?"

Whether Unity is or is not up to the job of creating a game like Skyrim is an irrelevant question today because it cannot be answered and it cannot be answered for one simple fact: "What games, just like my game, has the Unity game engine shipped and why would I add unnecessary risk to a multi-million dollar project because you have something that is shiny?"

Unity can be a buggy command-line tool with the most archaic of interface, requires you to physically power-cycle your machine every 20 minutes, may actually electrocute one of your game designers on occasion, though nobody has proved that either way just yet, and requires a very specific and no longer supported version of Linux, but so long as it has shipped hundreds of millions of dollars worth of product and proven itself worthy, studios will flock to it because the bad qualities are known, the risks are manageable and the DAMN GAME WILL SHIP and it won't be the engine that stops it!

Until Unity, or any other technology that forms a significant part of the tool chain, has proven itself worthy, by incremental adoption on ever larger projects, it won't be adopted wholesale. It will take a few brave and foolhardy souls who have shipped other smaller projects to say "yeah, I think I can take the small amount of risk and do this project with it to." Remember, most Executives Producers, most Technical Directors, most Lead Engineers, they don't have time to fully understand a shiny little toy barely on the game development radar and actually try it out to see, not just if it can make a prototype, because... Hey! GameMaker can make a decent prototype too, but to actually ship a real project, with a team working with it, over an extended period of time. Life is too busy and too full developing with tools that are known to work.

I have shipped other smaller projects with Unity, so when the chance came up to evangelize its usage on a new, slightly larger project, I took it. It paid off, it could have gone the other way and we'd be doing today one of two things: 1. Developing our own in-house engine or 2. Using something like Unreal. This decision adds risk to our project, but manageable risk. It is a brave decision by me. I am betting other people's money that Unity won't sink the project. The decision, if wrong, will dog my career for some time.

"Why would any studio these days develop their own engine?" is the question asked by many people who don't actually work at a studio. The answer is partly hubris, "Because it gives us an edge," "Because it wasn't invented here," "Because everyone elses technology sucks." But the other part, the hidden part, the part that few talk about because they cannot or will not articulate it, is because of risk, is because "writing your own custom engine" isn't all about ego but about "we can hire this team to make our game, and they will create their own engine, from scratch, for just our game, and it will take six months longer and require twice as many people as if we went with a 3rd-party engine, but this team, this very team, has shipped five other titles that have brought in over a billion dollars in revenue and we will give them whatever they want because it is a sure bet."

That is why Unity is not a AAA engine... yet.

 

Wow, excellent information JustinLloyd. Thanks for that bit of insight!

So, it sounds to me like the BEST thing Unity could do for marketing their product is to actually make their own AAA game with Unity, OR find someone else who will.
Or, get lucky with some title that makes a big splash, like minecraft.

 

I cannot estimate one way or the other whether that strategy would work for them. People will always say "Yes, but..."

It is similar to the "Which donut made you fat?" question. Out of all the donuts you ate, if you can find that one donut which made you fat, and then not eat it, you won't be fat.

If you can find that one game title that will make Unity acceptable to studios, and then make that one title but none of the others, Unity will be accepted.

Acceptance is won by degrees not by a single act.

 

Unity will at some point be acceptable as a AAA development suit, but it will take time.

They already have what they call their "AAA initiative", Shadow Gun was the first title to come out of that.

Also note that Unreal was at a point a startup, and in their case they made their own in house game (Called, goess what?)

Another thing that will happen is that small startups, indies better said, will start their projects with Unity. Eventually, some of these will grow into "star up level" studios, and later serious studios. Similar to the story JustinLloyd told earlier, these studios will see Unity as the "proven tool that is already used in-house and powered every studio success story."

It will take time to get that rep, though. If you are a "fan" that would love that to happen sooner, do your best to make your own great games and turn your one man indie studio into a real development house. Thats the best way you can help Unity become as big as Unreal out of the mobile space.

 

Square enix is working on a new RPG made on the unity engine, sounds accepted to me.

 

It is a shame that Kojima productions made a in-house engine with the same multiplatform features and toolset of Unity.
Oh man, could've use Unity already.

 

I would not be shocked if thats part of the "AAA initiative" or if Unity said they are taking a risk by financing a chunk of the project.

 

You can draw any line you like through a single data point.

One early adopter does not a trend make.

A single RPG on the PS Vita costing perhaps a few million bucks to develop is neither here nor there to Square Enix. There is probably someone in an influential position on that team that has used Unity in the past and did what I did at the company I currently consult for: Evangelize over many, many months to get enough people to listen.

And in 15 years time, somewhere in the world of game development, on a poorly trafficked forum of a weird little game engine, someone will ask "Could BangBangDuck have made Spitwad Duel VII?" at which point someone will say...

"I would say yes. But it would take alot to get the visual quality to that of Spitwad Duel VII."

 

Answer: Maybe

Question: Why is this important again?