this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
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It is so obvious even from just reading the article that it really has nothing to with the engine as staff were already using Unreal and could have just rolled with that. Blizzard has become so utterly irrelevant.
Normally I wouldn't try to be an armchair game developer, but I'm leaning towards agreeing with this. the article does say:
which is a surprise to me, considering how robust it generally is. It's superficial, but I can point to Fortnite as a game using Unreal and supporting a hundred players in one lobby along with being able to spawn custom buildings on the fly.
The closest analogue I can think of is FrostGiant using Unreal for presentation, sound, and inputs, but their custom Snowplay engine for everything else in Stormgate. This makes sense to me given they're trying some tricky and somewhat novel things (at least) on the networking side that Unreal doesn't support.
All that to say: I'm very curious about the details on how Unreal was unable to achieve what they wanted at the number of players they were targeting. I'm also curious why reducing scope (either in number of players or feature set) wasn't a viable option, especially after so long in development. I don't mean this as a "they're obviously dumb and wrong", I am genuinely curious what was planned and not working. I hope we get more details because cancelled games (and the development process as a whole) is fascinating to me.
It could be the networking can't handle what they want. A game like fortnite doesn't need anything super special from a networking perspective. Blizzard lost their best to frostgiant for networking.
Ark Survival Ascended can handle a large number of players as well, apparently. The default max is 70, but that can be changed with ini settings.