Unreal Engine 4.18 Released!

[spacegojira]

I think the most successful games made with UE4 (Ark and PUBG I would guess, Fortnite BR regarding the amount of players too) use dynamic lighting. People want to have games with huge open worlds, and those have to use dynamic lighting. Also, almost every single game can benefit from a dynamic time of day, even games that are fully indoor with only light coming through the windows. So even games like Paragon or Unreal Tournament would immediately look more dynamic and interesting.

Baked lighting is severely limiting the available gameplay a game can have. For example can’t have dynamic destruction of things like buildings, since its baked. So baked lighting should really be used for almost no games any more. I do see that it makes a lot of sense for architectural visualization and that’s what these world class features that UE4 recently got are mostly used for I think. UE4 is definitely the best engine for any arch viz, because it has this really perfect baked lighting. But almost any existing and future game would be better with dynamic lighting.

I completely agree with , I can only imagine few games where baked lighting is really the better choice. More and more people want dynamic worlds that feel less static and more real, more alive. Also procedural generated worlds / maps are what people are asking for more and more.
And I mean, why shouldn’t they? It’s 2017, the technology is there, as can be seen in CryEngine, it just needs to be implemented.

Personally I have such great ideas for gameworlds, but Unreal Engine is limiting me in so many ways… and as a small (indie dev) team, I don’t have the knowledge nor the resources to build complicated workarounds or rewrite the Engine.

Eventually, people are going to move on to a different engine, one that truly supports dynamic lighting and dynamic gameworlds in general. This may not happen this or even next year, but eventually it will. And I can’t imagine Epic wants to be an Archviz / VR Engine only.