Bandai Namco Entertainment has revealed that it is two years deep into production of a new in-house game engine, showing that the company is seeking to end its reliance on third-party engines. This is increasingly rare at a time when fully featured and supported engines such as Unity and Unreal exist, which makes game development that much faster and easier, at a price.
Bandai Namco's Engine Unit Director Katsusuke Horiuchi confirmed as such during an interview with Automation Media. “The reason for in-house production is that we want to continue to have the technological capabilities to create a solid foundation by ourselves,” he said, “rather than leaving the base to game engines made by other companies.” Bandai Namco having its own engine will eventually pay for itself, as it will avoid licensing fees for Unity or Unreal, and it could even license the engine for others to use if it wanted. Some developers prefer to keep it to itself, as Rockstar does with its RAGE engine.
Bandai Namco fans shouldn’t expect the engine to be announced for any titles for at least another year, since it’s still not finished. In fact there are no titles in development using the engine at all yet, so if fans are hoping to get a new Souls game using the engine be prepared to wait awhile. It just goes to show how involved creating a brand-new state-of-the-art engine can be, and why most developers simply use an existing engine for their projects in order to get them started and completed.
Bandai Namco and FromSoftware’s upcoming Souls-like title Elden Ring uses the company’s old proprietary engine, one that’s been re-purposed for an open-world game and still allows characters to look fantastic. It makes sense for developers who have grown accustomed to using a specific engine and all of its various features to continue using and refining it, although at some point a major update is needed if a developer wants to stay competitive with their AAA titles.
Graphics aren’t everything, but developers will increasingly want to take advantage of all the new features that the next-gen consoles like the PS5 and Xbox Series X are capable of outputting. Games like Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot and Tales of Arise currently use Unreal Engine 4, so rather than upgrading to Unreal Engine 5 it seems as if future titles will take advantage of Bandai Namco's proprietary one.
Source: Automation Media