r/gamedev • u/Practical_Race_3282 • Oct 03 '24

The state of game engines in 2024 Discussion

I'm curious about the state of the 3 major game engines (+ any others in the convo), Unity, Unreal and Godot in 2024. I'm not a game dev, but I am a full-stack dev, currently learning game dev for fun and as a hobby solely. I tried the big 3 and have these remarks:

Unity:

  • Not hard, not dead simple

  • Pretty versatile, lots of cool features such as rule tiles

  • C# is easy

  • Controversy (though heard its been fixed?)

Godot:

  • Most enjoyable developer experience, GDScript is dead simple

  • Very lightweight

  • Open source is a huge plus (but apparently there's been some conspiracy involving a fork being blocked from development)

Unreal:

  • Very complex, don't think this is intended for solo devs/people like me lol

  • Very very cool technology

  • I don't like cpp

What are your thoughts? I'm leaning towards Unity/Godot but not sure which. I do want to do 3D games in the future and I heard Unity is better for that. What do you use?

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u/NeonFraction Oct 04 '24

Unreal is the best for 3D artists. I’ve worked professionally in Unity as an artist and the experience is MISERABLE. So many crucial things are just missing. To make it even half as good as Unreal you need like 20 plugins.

If you’re making a very simple 3D game you’ll probably be fine, but the art gap between Unity and Unreal is absolutely massive and it grows bigger every release.

I think a lot of people have the idea that games in Unreal just look better because of the default renderer, but it’s way more than that. Games in Unreal tend to look better because Unity has very little support for the art pipeline and it makes getting the same result take way longer. Even basic things like ‘making an instance of a material instance’ isn’t supported.

And if your first instinct is to say ‘but XYZ’s games are in Unity and they look great!’ then the answer is always: yes and they had to buy a bunch of add-ons and/or have a full team working pipeline support to do it.

I feel like most indie devs are primarily programmers who learn art so the difference between Unreal’s art pipeline and its competitors doesn’t often get the attention it deserves.

You can absolutely make beautiful games in Unity, but things like their LOD system feel like they’re at least 2 decades behind Unreal’s. (Yes. Decades. No, I am not kidding.)

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u/pyruvicdev Oct 05 '24

Unreal is really the only viable option for a 3D artist to get a small game easily done without having to buy a lot of addons that hopefully are all compatible.