CRPG Pitfalls

Development Programming & Scripting
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(I apologize in advance for posting this here and the more nebulous nature of it - which is why I’ve opted for discussion than question. This is the aspect I’m most concerned about though and I didn’t see any other place to put it.)

In doing some research for a potential project that has come up, I’ve noticed that there’s been no CRPG of note made with Unreal in what seems to be the last 10-20 years. While I personally don’t see any reason why a CRPG couldn’t be made with Unreal, I also have significantly more experience and understanding with Unity as I’ve only recently transitioned to Unreal - and the company I work for is only interested in using Unreal.

Because of this, I feel like there could be something commonly understood that I’m just not seeing. Are there any innate pitfalls/issues, particularly on the programming side of things, that could make the creation of a CRPG in Unreal extraordinarily difficult or untenable?

As someone whom doesn’t pretend to be god’s gift to programming, I get the sense there could be a very good reason why no one seems to have done it to a commercial production level in a decade or more - but I also know there could be superficial reasons that explain why it hasn’t happened that have nothing to do with the engine.

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None that I can think of.

Borderlands series shows you can have a pretty deep item, class, and UI system.

Midnight Suns and Xcom series shows the engine can do turn-based combat quite well.

Really zero reason (that I’m aware of) you couldn’t make a great CRPG in Unreal.

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That’s what I was thinking too. There’s plenty of games with the pieces and none of the core systems sound like things I can’t think of answers for.

Just once I looked into the genre it seemed really odd to me how I couldn’t find a single one in the last decade. It’s not like Unreal hasn’t been a popular go-to engine in that time. Hell, Unity was practically demonized during some of that time. So just got this feeling in the back of my head that I’m not seeing or thinking about something obvious.

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Unreal Engine aims at consoles, and higher-end PC gamers.
Perhaps CRPGs need to support lower-end PCs, like netbooks and the like, with built-in graphics, where Unreal really isn’t all that well suited?
That is, would the “min spec” for an Unreal based game exclude a large number of the CRPG players you’d want to target?

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