You know any Triple A game produced by unity engine before?

I am working with a very big Openworld project with unity... I see the limitations that unity faces ...
- Slow game loading
- Poor handling of polygon causes lag
-Creating objects and deleting objects takes a long time to create a large map

In short , there are a lot of bad things about using unity to do a big project!
i can list a lot of big projects made with unreal engine .... what about unity ...You know any big projects use unity to do?

 

Rust is the only open world unity game I can think off.

Escape from Tarkov have large scenes but not open world

 

AAA game means AAA budget. 80 million of dollors and up. Is your project in the same weight category? (doubtful)
If not, there's no point in you asking about AAA, as you are not the one.

If you want an opentworld games, then subnautica is a good example. That was made with unity. A list of unity games made in unity can be found here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unity_games

You can also read this thread:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/are-there-any-aaa-games-made-with-unity.452667/

 

Two very popular modern non-mobile games made in Unity are Fall Guys and Escape From Tarkov. This list contains some other notable ones: https://unity.com/madewith

Open world with Unity is possible, but be prepared to go through lots of grievances. You''ll be fighting the terrain system, the (almost) asynchronous scene loading, will have to implement a custom floating origin, you'll be fighting to get Unity to unload certain assets (material instances, mesh data embedded in scenes) while trying to avoid massive stalls.

 

I believe it is our duty of the gamedev community to constantly remind beginners of this. Thank you.

 

Subnautica seems to handle all these okay, so it's doable.

With that said, maybe another engine would fit your project better?

Also, to also answer the original question, if we define AAA as a blockbuster game made from a traditionally AAA team (like the equivalent of say FF VII Remaster, or God of War or whatever equivalent), then the answer is NO.

With that said, whether AAA games are done with Unity has little or no consequence to us indie teams, so the question is kinda pointless (unless you are a AAA studio working on a blockbuster title, in which case, what are you doing here?)

 

Along with what everyone else has posted, it's probably worth mentioning that AAA studios typically develop their own in-house game engines for their games.
Sometimes, they'll even development a game engine that is entirely meant for creating one specific game or genre of games.

Unity is more of a general-purpose game engine. You can make any genre of game in Unity, but that means a lot of tools & features in Unity have to be abstracted to support many genres.

In contrast, a game engine meant for developing say, first-person shooters specifically, is going to out-perform any general-purpose engine, because it doesn't need to be designed around anything else. All the tools, features, and technical limitations of the engine are going to revolve around first-person shooters and first-person shooters only.
There's much more room to refine the engine and make performance optimizations when you don't have to consider every possible technical limitation of every possible video game genre.

 

Unity doesn't have any built-in system for handling huge, open worlds. Some games with huge, open worlds were made with Unity (like Subnautica, Kerbal Space Program) but in every case it was because the developers built their own technology to handle their own specific needs. You'll have to do the same. There are some features that accommodate creating your own system (like additive scene loading) but you still have the bulk to do on your own.

There are some tools on the Asset Store that might help. I don't know how useful they are, though, since I've never tried to make a big open-world project on my own.

Would Unreal Engine help at all? I've never used it so I don't know. But say you find a suitable engine that specializes in large open worlds. Now you have to make the actual content, which.is even more difficult. Even AAA studios struggle with this, hiring dozens of people to make millions of art assets, cut- scenes, and scripted events- all to end-up with a game that players call "boring" and "pointless" and "Once you get past the initially-impressive presentation, you quickly find that there's really nothing interesting to do".

Asking "What engine was [huge AAA game] made with? -because I want to make a similar game all by myself." is sort of like asking "Which stone did the ancient Egyptians use to build the pyramids?" thinking that limestone is going to make it easier somehow.

 

How much game dev have you done in the past?

I'm doing "very big" stuff in my game and none of those are causing issues. The catch is that, as others have alluded to, we're not just dumping "very big" amounts of stuff into Unity's general purpose systems and hoping it'll just play nice. You can't do that, and it's not a Unity thing, though engines are broadly getting better at it in general.

Early on in a game's development you'll want to figure out where it's going to tax your target platforms most, then design your own systems to optimise for those cases. Often that just means being selective about how you use existing systems, but sometimes you'll want to create something custom. An off-the-shelf tool simply can't be the perfect solution to everyone's problem ahead of time.

Example: If you want 100,000 birds flying around in your game then having each one as an individual GameObject with a skinned mesh and a collider and a rigidbody is not going to perform well. A few years ago I'd have approached that with a bit of custom scripting - use a pool to render the nearby ones, and a particle system or DrawMeshInstanced[Indirect] to render the rest. Today it's probably just a matter of using DOTS, because that's exactly the kind of problem they were trying to solve with it.

If you're trying to render a huge world then you have different problems to solve. Instead of lots of similar things that are constantly changing you now have a huge amount of unique stuff that doesn't change much, so you'd take quite a different approach. I don't know of anything off-the-shelf Unity provides to address that particular challenge. We put together something ourselves and it was surprisingly not difficult for our use case, but details matter there. There are engines that support various aspects of "very big" worlds out of the box, so if that's a key part of your game it could be worth some research.

 

Iirc its cost was 10 million though. Not a AAA budget, but just as much out of reach for the average forum user here.

 

NetEase is a big company that employ a lot of people, and they do open world games like rules of survival ... that scale from pc to mobile.

Here is the catch, they can probably license the source code of unity, so any problem vanish by affecting engineer to it and redo part of the engine instead of waiting for a 4 years bug to be fixed by nagging unity employee.

Everything else is about side setpping unity as much as possible to make open world game, that mean developing an expertise of these needed features AND unity to bypass. Kerbal for example do everything in DLL and use unity as a viewer of data for rendering, that's almost like doing everything from scratch, but still not that much works compare to a custom engine (especially iteration time).

 

Are you sure about that? Especially for Kerbal, whose rendering is, well, kinda basic, and for Audio you could simply implement FMOD yourself (Unity's audio is a thin -badly written- wrapper of an outdated FMOD version anyway), so I'm not sure Unity did all that much for them.

Which is the problem with Unity in general. Every time someone points out something good in a Unity game, the good part is something the developers wrote from scratch. Networking in Fall Guys? Written from scratch. Trees and Terrain in Firewatch? They wrote their own solution. Performance and rendering in Inside, they had source access and changed a ton of stuff.

Not to say this doesn't happen in all engines. It does, but usually they have at least a couple systems that are robust enough / performant enough, that you can use in your game guilt free.

While in Unity land, in almost every performance talk, we get experts telling us secrets like "You want to get good performance? Avoid using Unity feature X, it sucks and we have no plans of improving it (until it's replaced with something else in Y years)". Gee, thanks Unity.

Which brings us back to the AAA question. AAA teams have enough resources to re-write all of Unity's systems. There aren't any Unity systems worth keeping if you have the resources to re-write them, hence no AAA production will ever use Unity for a big budget blockbuster AAA game.

 

You don't have the black triangle problem, ie you can dev on the non performant unity while a dedicated team create custom code for the weaker part. The pipelining of production is great because unity is good as an editor interface. Plus you only rewrite critical part and the fragmentation of hardware is abstracted away, the latter being unity's biggest selling point, I mean uses to be...

Unity's problem is a feature problem. The caricature is the make game button, the problem is to believe in it, investing time to think it work, then backtracking parts that's not functioning as expected, it sting and I know, I lost 3 years because my concept of a open world sonic cross mario galaxy needed perfect control an collision unity couldn't provide, with input being the deal breaker (can't reimplement).

 

I mean, it sounds like Unity should rebrand itself as a prototype engine instead of a game engine.

 

Is AAA still something indies aim for? I thought the industry is starting with AAAA very soon. Maybe it's time to update all those delusions of grandeur to the new gold standard?

 

That might be a good idea, because unity performs excellently when used as a prototype engine.

Aiming to make an AAA title is pretty much aiming to create your very own Ubisoft. Which is a whole lot of hassle and not much fun.

 

I dont think Fall Guys can be categorized as AAA game ? But yeah it makes millions apparently (earn-wise )

 

I mean it is published by Devolver Digital so can't really call it indie. Maybe AA would be more appropriate? (I think the guys at Red Barrels - makers of Outlast - referred to themselves as a Garage AAA studio).

 

I'm really hoping III (triple I) catches on. That's what I usually call those mid-tier published games.

Heh. I guess so does wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAA_(video_game_industry)#III

 

I always thought III was a reference to "me, myself and I" - meaning solo devs. Guess I was wrong.

 

AAA refers to budget and production quality. For Fall Guys to be an AAA they'd need 80 million dollar budget, and hollywood level visuals. Or something.

I always thoght it was a roman numeral.

 

Originally, but everyday use can also mean mainstream blockbuster or high quality production value, or cinematic photo realism.

 

Clearly the only reasonable solution is to change the current system so we have 26 different classifications (AAA - AAZ) to account for the ever-growing list of studio types.

 

Well, we need to include III.

So AAA to ZZZ.What is that, 26^3?

 

Why compete with AAA? AAA only have the gfx aspect, indies all the rest like innovation, mechanics etc. That's were indies can shine.

 

Yes, but dont forget some AAA can innovate, alright, its not common but still (and some indies can bring nothing to the table too )

 

Not to mention true gameplay innovation is expensive and risky.

 

"Our game is rated ASS".

 

I think E.T. belonged in this classification.

 

Regarding thread title, I recently find out that few big companies use Unity, while they also have at least one own in house engines. Which is very interesting from that angle.
And they have also reasons, to use Unity over Unreal, in certain productions.
And when saying Unity, also considering latest releases.

More over, at least one uses Unity for top AAA title.

 

Was wondering if there was a generalization like this. At the AAA studio I worked at, one of the flagship titles used a custom in-house engine, but we had a few other side projects using the same franchise brand, that would typically explore off-the-shelf engines like Unity and Unreal. For example, mobile versions of the flagship PC title. So, is that considered AAA?

 

To be honest, I don't know if mobile games, or ported, can be considered as AAA.

 

From my limited observations, it seems they often use Unity for the Mobile versions of their AAA franchise.

I think of Mario Kart from Nintendo, which uses Unity for the Mobile version, but in-house tech for the Nintendo Switch version for example.

Another game that comes to mind is Call of Duty, in-house tech for the actual game and Unity for the Mobile game.

 

Nintendo have never made a AAA title

 

Zelda botw needed to sell 2 million copies to break even on its dev costs, seemingly not including other costs such as marketing etc. Do the math

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ollieb...-2-million-copies-to-break-even/#522173e2615f

 

True but with that mindset candy King or what it's called be AAA

 

Do you have any sources showing how much King spent to develop Candy Crush?

EDIT:
I found this article, which is speculation, but probably the closest you'll find to dev costs.

 

I believe considerably little, in comparison to any AAA game, since King had resources anyway and been on the market since 2002.
But, if believing Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candy_Crush_Saga and their references:

 

Right. My point is @Peter77 is talking about cost, not revenue, and @MDADigital is talking about revenue, not cost. It's the cost of making the product that determines the game industry classification of AAA or not.

 

For my own classification quality and scope play a role too. Star Citizen has the AAA cost, but as far as I can tell (without having played it) it's still not the kind of polished and content rich game that I think of when saying AAA.

 

Well, that is good point.

I just quote this one, but whether to agree or not, it is separate matter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAA_(video_game_industry)#:~:text=AAA (pronounced and sometimes written,higher development and marketing budgets.

Maybe someone has a better classification, but in my view, AAA games are these, which are able to pull latest graphics. The cost of course will follow.
If to look into quotation, many AAA games don't have replayability, nor additional source of income, other than title sells. Unless ... well, we add DLC these of course days. I think.

Sure I would like to agree. And probably for most AAA games that classification will fit nicely. Depending who expecting what. Only if I recall Watch Dogs and its AAA failure on many front in my view. I couldn't even launch it on modern hardware back in days. (Code to redeem supplied with new GPU) Continuous crashes. Not to mention huge amount of bugs. But still supposedly was AAA?

 

I have no idea how you came to this conclusion when "live service" games are so pervasive and include a variety of monetization tactics (Destiny 2, Fortnite, NBA 2k20, FIFA etc)

- You have the different tiers of games (special editions/gold/silver/collector editions)
- Season passes
- Microtransactions
- DLC
- Paid character skins and lootboxes
- Paid boosters (xp boosts, more loot, etc)

Go look at GDC talks and take a shot of alcohol every time you hear "recurrent user spending" and you will be dead in a few hours.

Over 50% of Activision Blizzard's income is from microtransactions. EA makes a ton of money from FIFA card packs, etc.

I would argue that the industry is running out of ways to monetize their games outside of the initial sale price considering there are so many different (and greedy) techniques.

and don't forget the adverts. The UFC game that had actual, real adverts when watching a playback of a match, the Avengers game that had Verizon skins as a promotion...

That doesn't even count when they say "oh hey this character is exclusive to [store name]" Want all 3 characters? Then you will need to buy 3 copies. 1 from company A, 1 from company B, 1 from company C if you want the "full" experience.

 

AAA titles can be buggy and unpolished. Google "Assassin's creed No Face bug". That's an AAA.

There's also stuff like this:

Also an AAA

explanation:

Spoiler

The NPC accidentally set itself on fire during cutscene which wasn't supposed to happen. Then died, causing mission to fail.

 

Hi there! Just a 2 cents.

That is a great question, many offered a good explanation and not much else to add on it; just bumping, AAA games or triple-a games called as such, are something to look up when wanting to see what it takes to make a blockbuster like film/game. The AAA definition falls into ''a game (that has a scope unreachable by smaller indies (unless they spent their life on that single game), thus big, huge, immense-like scope) that requires so many people and resources/production budget to attain - with a level of polish and attention that is not seen in smaller games''. I mean a smaller indie (solor/2-3 team) can make 'like' a AAA or AA/A (or B-game), it will feel AAA-ish but never have the scope of a real AAA made by 100s/thousands of people (unless outsourcing, which is tantamount of reaching that manpower; when we think about it the Asset Store offers that in a sense, because some assets take hundreds/thousands of hours to make/man hours...that saves time, al ot, so you can finish your game; because alone, you can't do all these assets - And - the game; one or the other - if you are making a AAA like game/in size/scope/polish/grandeur).

Unless making a smaller game, it's why Unity games oftenly are pixel games (which they can be AAA-ish too) but sometimes you look at them and you think that the game does not represent 'mainstream AAA 3D games'...but 2D game. There are 2D games that have that star indie factor/AAA-feel to them (Stardew Valley and Cuphead), but they are rare. As for 3D games, I don't see Many games made in Unity - in 3D - that are not on mobile/android. Most mobile games are not AAA games, not saying they can't be; they Can be, but most android games from small indies using Unity engine fall in the 'indie game' category (pixel scroller games and 3d scroller games); not FPS shooter games (like Doom Eternal or something) that are AAA mainstream 3D games. The most technically demanding games are MMO, FPS, Traditional Fighting Games, many of them are - in 3D, not 2D. Thus, 3D games made in Unity Can Be AAA like but few made. Because making a 3D game is whole different thing than 2D game. I am making one and I hope to reach that/I know it's impossible to have the scope/polish of a Real AAA, but if somehow it 'feels' AAA enough (despite being obviously a indie game), than, for me, that is job done (considering all the constraints/restrictions we have (budget/time/being a solo dev etc)).

Bright Memory (I am trying to make a 3D FPS game close to that in polish/quality), Stardew Valley (incredible 2D game), Cuphead Valley (Canadian great game using US cartoons of 1930s, they asked themselves why not make a cartoons game - nobody is making it), Subnautica (an incredible 3D aquatic game that is quite unique (sub maring/abyss searching/scavenging)), League of Legeds, Rivals of Aether, Escape From Tarkov (The best Unity FPS game so far)...in that list I would say Escape From Tarkov, Bright Memory and Subnautica fall closest to 3D AAA.

And to answer the question; Unity has some AAA like games, such as République (a great one), several GO games (Hitman GO/Tomb Raider GO) and the engine is used by AAA for prototyping (they use their own engine seeing making AAA Games requires custom inhouse solution; just repeating what was said). If only there were more AAA like games made with Unity engine, but the engine is all purpose goal engine and mainly (used) for mobile/android/2D games (because that is what indies can do, can't do 3D AAA games, too much costs for small indie). When I see HDRP that was made, I thought to myself, Who is going to use this? VFX movie companies for films/TV...but are there Indie games making 3D AAA CGI like games? So far not much; all doing 2d mobile games (some 3d); so I felt that HDRP was a bit wasted (why make this if no one uses it to make a PC/console game; ok, they know Some/very few devs Do Use HDRP to make a AAA like game with Unity engine); but at least they are using URP, which taht one works on mobile and delivers great visuals on VR/mobile... I think also Unity indies don't want to 'Try' AAA games, because too hard, can fail and just too much risk; not worth it for potential fail down the line (if can't even finish the game because it's so huge to do for small team/solo -> may abandon the game/too big/feature creep etc...). 2D games simpler, doable, so that is what is done with Unity (and ends up clogging the google app store, where it is sad, because mobile games are dime a dozen/million, so many games, now they are basically given free; at 99c you might make something out of it there/too much competition saturation). On Unreal,s side they ahve FPS kit made, so it is great for that ( I did consider that since I am making a FPS game like a few people on this website), but Unity felt much more a indie place/best for starting when know nothing/more support and back then, the asset store was the answer for me (Unreal market place a few years ago was just barren).

Just a 2 cents.

PS: I understand that AAA games may seem predatory with 'micro-transactions'/in-game purchases and such; but it is what it is. Monetization. We may not like this word; but games are not free/made 'free'; they can be 'Free-2-Play', but not free (to maeke it). So monetization is answer, the kind today is tranasction in the game itself rather then upfront payment. Now they feel predatory because 'grinding your wallet - one micro-transaciton at a time - one skin/card or whatever thing for your few dollar/cents'. Which if tallied up it can start to add up and do make a lot; rather than a 'one time purchase price'. But people now are used to free games (because COVID/inflation, people are more short on change/cash and the costs of Making a Game Rised non-stop for the last 30 years...but the Prices of the games did not; I mean yaeh a AAA game can be 60-90$...but Normally it would 150-200$, that Is the Real cost of making this game. Who has 150$ to pay per AAA game to buy...i f there are about 1000s AAA games coming out all at the same time; serious competition for cream of the crop/selection in the making. 1-5% will become the AAA games (and will take 99.9% of all moneys made in game industry; the rest (90%) will take in that last 0.1% of money). They have to because AAA games cost millions to make/thus must recoup it. AAA games can't be Too Original or Too Out Ther/Niche, ebcause then that can cause alienation/unfamiliarity/unreachability/game is weird/obscure...(might be very original but just...not good fit for a mainstream game; plus, it is the Major Insecurity with a million dollars budget riding 'on the line' with making a unique/orignal game - Risky Proposition/can cause AAA to fail/lose all investments/games does not sell well because too obscure/unique/niche/not mainstream)). Thus, AAA games are faced with a problem : Offer vs Demand; Way More Offer than Demand now (Offer - Games; Demand - People wanting them). For every gamer out there, there is a zillion games for them to choose - and only so few pocket dollars and hours of their time to play All these games (and they have a game backlog' as long as your 4 combined limbs). So let's say they are spoiled - senseless; I maen it is the Best time to Be; Games are Aflowing; on Steam

30 games come out Every Day; Every DAy, can you imagine (that is about 10,000 games added per year(!)) that is some serious competition (your game is flooded by avalanche of daily games, you must have great marketing to stand out/otherwise no one knowsyour game exists on PC platforms); tomorrow 30 more are coming (and yes some said that this can cause the E.T crash of 1983 with too many indie games that cause 'Shovelware games' (pej., like that shovelware E.T. pile of games in that Mexico landfield), I mean we make faster games now/democratize; but does not mean Good game/Polished one..so this is why the whole 'Asset flip' thing/an people saying indie game trash. They Are So Spoiled, by AAA, (and I include myself) we all are...there is just sooo much games out there..so like how do you monetize anymore. Unless you are AAA, it means Devaluation of games, games sold for 50c or sold (or 'not sold') as - free. F2P. People except it, they even expect AAAgames to be free. These AAA games costsed so much to make; how can they make thir budget back..they can't, with 'free game'. So, we arrive to the Monetization/Ingame MicroTransaction and 'subscriptions'...somehow/someway money must come, not free to make it. It is the same problem with Movies...why do candies, soda pop and popcorn at the Cinema theatre are charge 40$...when the movie is 20$...because that is what keep these cinema theaters alive...because Netflix took over and Cinema theater suffered; people watched their films at home; so cinema theaters saw revenue loss and were faced with the question - how to make any money now/exist still/not defunct? Charging 10x price their junk food is how. In AAA games - faced with same problem, no oone is buying AAA games for 50-60$ anymore; so hhow to make any $ and the cost of making a AAA game is roughly 200$ per game copy (due to inflation and Immense Quality Asked of AAA games now as 'a standard' that is unsustainable' with low funds)? Micro transaction, only solution to monetize.

Thankfully on Steam and certain platforms people still are willing to make 'one-time purchase' so that indie devs don't have to emply these transaction tactics to grind the wallet of pennies of the gamer.

 

I don't count bugfixing as polish. An indie game can be very rough and unpolished without having a single bug. AAA games can be highly polished, but riddled with bugs. RDR2 is one of the most polished games ever, maybe even to a fault, with ridiculous attention to detail and countless animations for things that wouldn't really have needed them. I haven't played it yet, but two reviewers complained about that.

I'm trying to think of an unpolished game that tried to be AAA, but I struggle to find a good example. Fallout 76 might be close, but that was mostly bugs, poor design and lack of content iirc. I haven't played it though.

 

I know one at the dev's at King and they use a inhouse engine the article does not talk about that. (only did a quick browse of it sorry if it is mentioned)

Which also cost money to develop, anyway my point is cost is not what makes a AAA game a AAA game its content etc

 

Perhaps defintion of AAA is "a lot of attention to the presentation, not much to the gameplay". Because that's what pretty much RDR2 was. Kinda similar to Max Payne 3, where somebody clearly was trying to make a movie, and then suddenly remembered it is supposed to be a shooter.

In case of RDR2, yeah, great animations, ridiculous amount of attention to details in visuals, but I'm not sure if someone actually playtested it.

 

That's pretty much on point with my view, and that's why we indies should concentrate on mechanics and gameplay

 

Advanced Super Self ?

 

That's unfortunate...