I want to butt in here because there are a few arguments I don't think are really all that valid...
Ok so let's say that a comparison has been done and C4 is strong in some respects and Unity is strong in others. It is a tie, we have to chose C4 or Unity:
In this department the only valid metric is: titles completed.
The fact Fargo got access to Unity's source code should tell you everything you need to know about that.
Normally, a company builds its
own game engine. In other words,
zero titles have used it before.
That's how it has been since the dawn of computing. You didn't buy "Turn-Based Isometric Combat Engine" off the shelf and plugin your X-Com art assets. id Software didn't just purchase the rights to "3D FPS Engine" and load their Nazi graphics in. No, normally you coded the entire thing from the ground up yourself.
There's a reason for that. Because NO game engine will do EVERYTHING you want or need it to do. It just doesn't happen.
If you want an analogy, I run into the same problem with coding the Codex. Sure, I could whack up a WordPress installation instead of coding shit myself (Like how we use someone elses forum software). But nothing does what I want it to. Or it has a lot of extra bloat. Or I need to spend 6 months learning how the fuck it works when I could have built an easier interface myself in half a day (seriously, has anyone even looked at Joomla? WTF are 90% of those options for anyway?).
ANY pre-built engine (be that Unity or anything else) = Bloat = Slower Load Times = Difficulty = Learning Time. Because the damn thing needs to cater for Bob - who wants to make an awesome flight simulator, and George - who's busy making 2D fissiks based games. So the Engine needs to handle both. If it can't, than it means there's less shit in the engine and you run into problems for something someone is trying to do...
... hence source code access.
I could probably guarantee that Wasteland 2's "Unity" Engine, by the time InXile are done with it, probably won't look much like Unity anymore. In much the same way as Bethesda fucked with GameBryo. In fact if they
didn't get source code access, I'd have bet Fargo would've looked at something else. Even perhaps buying something off of his Obsidian mates.
Because once you have source code access,
the game engine doesn't matter so much anymore. It's all just computer code in the end and if it doesn't do what you want, well, you just re-write the fucking thing.
Troike didn't build Arcanum or TOEE with an off-the-shelf engine. They built it from the ground-up. For the most part, it worked. And their development of Bloodlines (if my memory serves) included getting Valve to add shit in because Source couldn't handle whatever it was they were trying to do.
So "titles completed" as a metric is complete bs. I think inXile would've looked far deeper and harder at the engine than just that. Because it doesn't matter how many titles have been completed, if the large majority of them are shitty browser-based games with laggy controls. There have been barely any games with the CryEngine for example - and yet do you think any of those developers went "Oh, we should use that shity browser-based engine instead because, look, more shitty titles!!".
The metric is: Will the engine do what we want? And if not, will we be able to add that functionality in easily? With source code access, both of those questions are solved.
Now to this issue of support. "Oh, lots of people use Unity - therefore inXile will have lots of support!". Yeah, I can totally see a post from Fargo now appearing on the Unity Community Forums. "Hey, we're trying to make a AAA title and this shit here don't work... Someone help?". inXile are professional game developers. IE: We're not talking about Bob in his shed getting help from Dave the retiree next door. We're talking about the qualified Engineer at the factory talking directly to the other qualified Engineer at the manufacturer.
I don't doubt for a second that Fargo has the full support of the
entire fucking Unity development team because Unity fucking need this to be a rip-roaring success if they intend to go mainstream. They would've gotten that sort of support from ANY engine because they NEED sirius bizness people to use their products. And if sirius bizness people need help, you help them if you want to keep your company alive. You don't use Dave's help - because while he might have good intentions, Dave only works on his project on weekends...
... and do you really think they're going to wait around for the days to idle by while they *hope* someone out there has an answer? No, chances are they'll hire someone and solve it themselves (with their source code access). And then Unity will port that feature into their main code stream.
Any game engine is going to have problems. Unity will be no different. In the end, like all the other games, I doubt we'll even notice what engine it was built on. Except for the unskippable intro movie logo that will no doubt come up when the game starts. The fact they're using a pre-existing engine just means they'll get through the prototype stage a lot faster and hopefully, be able to focus more on the content. Rather than waiting for the whole engine to be written by a dedicated team (in fact, if they're smart, they'll push any work that needs to be done on the engine onto the Unity developers themselves as part of the fee they paid).
