Deciding between CryENGINE or UE4 for Open World Games

My development team and I are currently discussing what game engine (CryENGINE or UE4) we are going to use for our open world game. The game will take place in modern day Chicago and is about the struggles of two Southside Gangs, the Black Disciples and their rivals the Gangster Disciples. We want an engine that will deliver a high amount of visual fidelity and support massive environments. We want a world that will be at least 64km2. Also the ability for large amounts of civilians, cars, and backround objects. Performance is expected to be relatively runnable across PC’s and possibly next gen consoles. Which one is the better options? Also what do you guys think about our game idea? We have about 25 people on our team atm.

If you’re looking for a quick easy developing nothing in life is that quick every Engine you need to know at least one 3D software, sound , visuals, etc… Unreal does not offer modelling or sculpting its just an Engine where we piece everything. However, EpicGames said we are entitles to use their free marketplace assets in our games, but most of the time our developers are focusing studying Blender or Maya or purchase meshes from a third-party websites or program such as Speedtree and Mixamo Fuse for quick simple development.

If your team is very small and new to developing I suggest purchasing the $19 software and cancel it and practicing it without any updates. Also you are free to publish at this point which is why I love UE4’s EULA agreement that we can pay for $19 and keep the Engine rather than paying $9 every month for CryENGINE. Anyway go for which Engine that can make the dream game you always wanted to create and study different programs you will need for it to happen in my case that would be Unreal Engine 4, Maya LT, Blender, Photoshop, and Sony Vegas for streaming.

Many people will tell you that the game engine is not the most relevant part by 95%. Either engine can do what you want… Provided your team is knowledgeable enough and invests the time into learning how to do it. Neither engine will prevent a knowledgeable team from doing exactly what you want.

Many here are biased as of course you are on a UE4 forum. :cool: and that Epic did not have public woes just within the last 60 days regarding paying employees and questions about if they were financially viable etc…

Seriously, if you actually have a 25 person team, you should already know the answer to that question to be honest unless you all are very young. That’s me being brutally honest.

Unlike Cryengine Epic provides pretty consistent updates (I mean really good updates and not just bug fixes), FBX support is top notch and youtube is already flooded by quality video tutorials.

So yeah, at this point UE4 should be natural choice for any developer

Either, the engine you looking for is the Dream Engine. It’s the most powerful and beautiful engine out there. It also creates everything for you without clicking a button.
Unfortunately it has a bug that makes it always crash and lose your work. But everybody still use it daily.
Oh it’s 100% free too!!! Screw Crytek and Epic. Dream engine is the perfect engine for you.

Hey here probably the answer you are looking for:

From what i here and you can find some developers on here who transferred from cry engine to also confirm, Cry Engine is powerful yes but very complicated and difficult to work with, for a faster and easier work flow UE 4 can create your game with yea game with a less stressing and easy work flow (well it just not as complicated and difficult as cry engine).

Unreal engine 3 has been used to make massive MMOs by AAA companies so i don’t see why unreal engine 4 can’t deliver the same results and quality. Now all you need to do is probably post to get consultant from the talented guys on this forum and they can give you and idea or insight on how to go about building your game to accomplish your goal in UE 4.

But both Engines can handle massive open world, Unreal engine 4, i am building a mmo world in the engine, and personally i would never choose Cry engine because they community don’t have the supportive, fun and crazy bunch of awesome people like this community. As one person mention they tons of training videos and if you are stuck all you have to do is post in forum and within an 1 -3 hours someone post a solution. This community is super helpful vs Cry engine’s dead/dying community.

and to the guy how said something about Dream engine… please don’t advertise any other engine here, and nothing beat unreal engine 4 dude… It payed but it has more support and faster updates over any engine out there. and the fact dream engine has a bug that loses your work, that alone kills its reputation.

Just go with unreal engine 4 my friend, in the course of 2-3 months you can finish a prototype of your game with your team size, the engine is easy and fast to learn, and very simple to build complex games in once you get the hang of the work flow (which was in like 1- 2 weeks of training and playing around for me)

Asking on the Unreal Forums whether you should use Unreal is, perhaps, not going to give you the most unbiased source. :slight_smile: That being said, as the produce lead on a game dev project that recently switched from Unity to Unreal for a medium-sized game project, I can probably speak to some of your concerns. I have been absolutely thrilled with the switch, and so has my entire team. Developers, artists, level designers… everybody’s so much happier since the switch.

The reasons for our switch were legion (I wrote a 3,000+ blog post on that very subject and feel like I barely scratched the surface), but I’ve come to the conclusion that there simply isn’t a close second to UE4 right now for large or small projects, and Epic has been increasing that lead rapidly. To sum up the biggest advantages I see :

  • Unreal has been honed for the needs of AAA game developers for over sixteen years. Literally hundreds of AAA games have been made with it, likely including many of the games that motivated you to want to make games yourself. As a result, a lot of the tasks you need to do to make a game have been anticipated and made easier.
  • Epic is serious about making UE4 more accessible and easier to learn. The progress from 4.1 to 4.4 has been at an absolutely breakneck pace. We’re only three months into our switch, and we’re all comfortable with the tool. For experienced game devs and game designers, the learning curve really isn’t that steep and the official video tutorials are great at getting you over the initial part of it.
  • The pricing is ridiculously affordable and the royalty percentage is very reasonable. The pricing also scales nicely if your team grows - you only pay the $19.95 per month for each additional member.
  • Building iOS apps on Windows?! Building iOS apps on Macs without going through XCode? Aw, yeah!
  • Source code and build instructions included at no extra cost? The value of this cannot be understated for mid-size and larger team.
  • Quality. I’ve spent a fair bit of time looking at the Unreal source code to try and understand the “Unreal way” of doing things. I’ve reviewed a lot of code and worked in a lot of large projects in my 20+ years of programming and I’ve honestly never seen a code base this large that’s in this kind of shape. It’s impressively well-coded.
  • Stability. CryEngine is a nice engine by all accounts with a lot of nice features. I don’t think it’s on a par with UE4, but it’ll get the job done. However, I have one really big concern with it - which is whether the company is even going to be here in five years? Epic appears to have solid financials.
  • Attitude. I’ve had an opportunity to interact with a fair number of people at Epic over the last month, and the impression I get from every single one of them is that they like what they’re doing, they’re proud of what they’re doing, and they want to keep making UE4 even better. They’re very responsive and are listening to customer needs. We’ve seen several of our concerns fixed in the time we’ve been using UE4.

There’s lots of other, smaller reasons, but those were the high-level biggies for us. The way I see it, if you’re going to use an engine and hitch your cart to somebody else’s horse, the horse to bet on right now is Unreal.

(Yes, I realize I sound like a fan-boy. That’s what three months of using UE4 has done to me.)

No sir, you sound pretty reasonable (at least for me).

You should check Unity forums. This is place where fan-boys breed :slight_smile:

On the serious note - another good reason for me to stick around the UE is extremely friendly community. Yes, here and there I see rude or/and cynical comments but in general people take time to answer often very obvious questions. When you just starting up with new engine most of the questions are obvious and sometimes ridiculous. What I see in other communities experienced users just post links or whine “use the search goddammit”, but not here :slight_smile:

Oh, believe this I know about. There are threads over there dedicated to bad mouthing me because of that blog post I mentioned.

can you send me blog post link?

Sure. It’s here:http://martiancraft.com/blog/2014/08/an-unreal-decision/

64km, little smaller than the environment in GTA V then? They had a little over 40 fulltime artists working on the world over the course of about 5 years.

You could probably do this with 25 people, scale back a bit? Maybe only 40km? I don’t think you should attempt something so big that the player gets lost.

You guys have a website or logo yet? Can’t wait to play this, sounds awesome! :cool:

Thanks. Interesting read

Okay from what I noticed in Cryengine you can click a button and get autogen’ed, lush terrain. However, their terms seemed quite hostile to Indies until recently.

Now- I am a programmer not an artist. But even I noticed UE4 has great support of FBX import. Last time I checked Cryengine they did not. Hopefully they resolved it

Not sure why this is such a tough decision. You need to evaluate both tools. I’m here on this forum for a reason. I like UE4. But if you are having some sort of dilemma for some reason then just take a little time and evaluate both

I think this is a joke actually… nice one, it took me a little to grasp it…