Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio Techical Manager: "We won't do away with the Dragon Engine"

[Dooble]

https://type.jp/et/feature/25374/

From a new Interview

Google Translate:

-- With the future survival of the series in mind, you are training new employees to gain a wide range of experience.

yes. However, when creating ``Ryu ga Gotoku,'' we absolutely must not do away with the Dragon Engine , and we will continue to develop in-house engines.

Dragon Engine concentrates its development resources on the functions necessary for "Ryu ga Gotoku," and the biggest advantage is that new features can be added quickly. If you are using a general-purpose engine, you can send an email to support and get a response in about 3 days, but if you ask the programmer next to you, it will only take 5 seconds. I think this difference is huge.

However, it is not a good idea to think that "our game engine is the best!" In particular, I believe that we programmers should always have a sense of crisis: ``This is better over there, and we have to work harder .''

Click to shrink...

Employee training refers to RGG Studio using three engines (Dragon Engine, Unreal and Unity). More in the link.

 

[Lampa]

No surprise there, I think people were afraid of it happening when they made Ishin! in UE4, but after playing it I don't think it's "built from the ground up" in UE4, because it feels and plays a lot like the old game(s). Their use of that engine might be more like what GSG did for GTA The Trilogy, with UE being used as a renderer. Which actually makes sense for doing a modern remakes/remasters quickly (relatively to rebuilding them fully).

 

[J75]

Dragon Engine runs like a dream on PC, no stutter-fest or anything. I'm cool with it, it's a solid engine.

 

[Linus815]

Yeah, it's logical. Honestly, where RGG is right now - with all the assets, the workflow, the ability to still release on PS4 which seems important for especially Japanese sales- I think dragon engine is aboslutely here to stay for the tentpole releases for a while.

I can see them experiment with new engines for smaller projects like gaiden games or remakes like with ishin (which really was most of the original assets running inside an unreal container, tbf)

 

[bleits]

Don't know what they were thinking with Ishin. Going back to loading if you have to enter a building was a downgrade.

 

[mrmickfran]

Good

I love the insane physics it brings lol

 

[SinnyIndonesian]

It's come a long way since Yakuza 6. Runs like a dream on PS5, too.

 

[arcticice]

It's perfect as it is. Runs amazingly well

 

[Kida]

Great news! I hope the next mainline game has some big upgrades though.

 

[JurassicJack17]

Good, it may be a little goofy at some point but I love it.

And it looks so gorgeous at night.

 

[convo]

For the purposes for the kind of games they make, and the rapid releases and iterations that happen with it, it is serving their needs well enough for now.
Even their latest game isn't exactly trying to be AAAA, it's just the games they've been making only bigger.

 

[Duncan]

make another binary domain then you fucking cowards

anything else you say will be NOTHING BUT LIES

 

[Foffy]

I see nothing wrong with their engine. Their move to Unreal didn't solve the weakness of the Dragon Engine (daytime lighting) very much.

 

[convo]

Their set-pieces will never be anything bigger than a large structure coming out of the ground, they hardly need to compete with Spider-Man or GOW for any reason. RGG is as street level as it gets with the main draw being a fun story and i believe they'll still come out with beat'em ups with other Gaiden or one more Judgment game.

 

[PLASTICA-MAN]

If they can upgrade the engine and finally abandon last-gen then fine, if they gonna continue what theyr are doing now, it's no help.

 

[ValKiryuSonicEX]

Also kind of confirms that the Spikeout team really did work on the battle system for the PS2 games.

 

[convo]

If they can upgrade the engine and finally abandon last-gen then fine, if they gonna continue what theyr are doing now, it's no help.

Click to shrink...

The switch 2 will be more adjacent to a PS4 and if the support it than the tail will continue, supporting as many systems as possible seem like good business sense and honestly their ambitions don't seem to require anything more than just more dev time. It'll mean future games will just run better on new systems because they can't really bog things down with the latest glitz and glamor.

 

[shadowman16]

Good. I have issues with the engine, but I have WAY more issues with the Ishin remake so Ill be glad if the next few RGG games are still on the DE. Just hope that whenever they make RGG9, they'll make sure its not the first game on a new engine, to avoid teething issues like 6 had.

 

[Dooble]

Also kind of confirms that the Spikeout team really did work on the battle system for the PS2 games.

Click to shrink...

We knew that for a long time, but I am always interrested in hearing about the original Yakuza team and how the mix up of Amusement Vision and Smilebit worked out.

Appereantly it was a mix of "console" and "arcade" teams, which implies that Amusement Vision was all about arcade games...which is not true to me. Ever since 2001 and Super Monkey Ball, they focused on the home consoles. And Smilebit was not really about "console-esque" titles. We all would agree that JSR was arcadey as all hell. Same with Panzer Dragoon Orta and GunValkyrie.

From a different interview that was also recent, we learned that the city part of JSR was a proto Yakuza.

I guess in the end it worked out like this: Battle part = Amusement Visions experience with Spikeout, Adventure part = Smilebit experience with building cities in JSR. According to the interview, It's why the loading times were so long, the two teams clashed somewhat. I guess all the cinematic parts were built up from scratch.

In the end, all of Yakuza series feels cohesive which is down to the leadership of the team (Nagoshi)

 

[julia crawford]

makes sense

 

[Zafir]

Sounds good to me. Wasn't impressed with their UE4 take in Ishin, stuttering at launch, no ultrawide support etc.

 

[Helix]

Dragon Engine works quite well so far so yeah keep it!

 

[Mocha Joe]

Fuck yes. Dragon Engine is just too good to give up over UE4/5.

 

[Imran]

They definitely need to work on DE's day lighting but I imagine they probably will.

Unless it's not working or making development slower, there's probably no good reason to throw away an engine they spent a ton of time and money working on.

 

[unknown_nut]

Keep on upgrading the Dragon Engine. It's in a good spot atm in Infinite Wealth.

 

[Greywaren]

It works great right now and they can just keep making improvements on it. Much better than switching to another engine entirely.

 

[Linus815]

this "daytime lighting" thing is so overblown.

daytime lighting is flat because .... its just flat even IRL compared to more dramatic conditions like early morning, evening, night...

like yakuza "daytime" usually have fuck all clouds or any sort of weather, so yeah its gonna look flat compared to night conditions when all the colourful lights are contrasting the dark sky.

its not like unreal suddenly magically makes daytime look any less flat.

in fact, in infinite wealth, daytime looked really good in yokohama. in hawaii they just went overboard with the brightness to emulate tropical sunlight, but thats not the engines fault, thats an artistic choice

 

[RealTravisty]

The PS4 versions will live! \o/

 

[Mesoian]

I mean why would you? Yakuza 8 runs amazingly. The little weird things, like people in the background of cutscenes turning around to avoid walking into the shot, are more endearing than off-putting.

 

[Arsene no Kiseki]

Thank god lol. Ishin had really annoying Unreal stutter glad they aren't moving away from Dragon.

 

[Dinjoralo]

It'd be nice if they gave some actual technical reasoning for why. I do appreciate it, the Dragon Engine seems good as an end-user and I don't want every game out there to be made in Unity or Unreal. But I wanna know why!

 

[HiLife]

My fav games from the series are on the engine so that's good news.

 

[Mesharey]

Good, Ishin was not fun to play with all the pop-ins.

 

[Dooble]

It'd be nice if they gave some actual technical reasoning for why. I do appreciate it, the Dragon Engine seems good as an end-user and I don't want every game out there to be made in Unity or Unreal. But I wanna know why!

Click to shrink...

Experimenting with other engines feeds right back into developing the Dragon Engine.
Daytime lighting in 8 improved somewhat thanks to Ishin Kiwami experiments

 

[ArchLector]

Why has engine talk become such a PR talking point, lol! Of course they won't change it when they have been having considerable success with their current tools.

It'd be nice if they gave some actual technical reasoning for why. I do appreciate it, the Dragon Engine seems good as an end-user and I don't want every game out there to be made in Unity or Unreal. But I wanna know why!

Click to shrink...

The interview provides one reason, it's easier for them to iterate with their current engine.

 

[EntelechyFuff]

I don't have a lot of technical expertise here but I'll say I'm always impressed by how good Dragon Engine games look when they need to, despite being an aging engine powering games that are likely built on a modest budget.

I'd say DE is especially good at handling dynamic image quality. Moment-to-moment it looks pretty standard, but when it needs to look good, it looks EXTREMELY good, right up there with some of the best AAA.

bread.gif

 

[Mocha Joe]

Why has engine talk become such a PR talking point, lol! Of course they won't change it when they have been having considerable success with their current tools.


The interview provides one reason, it's easier for them to iterate with their current engine.

Click to shrink...

Because that's why

Yakuza's Dragon Engine is a ‘Bit Old,’ RGG Studio Boss Weighing ‘Merits’ of Unreal Engine 5 Shift - IGN

In a new roundtable interview, RGG Studio boss Masayoshi Yokoyama said the studio is "weighing the merits" of a transition to Unreal Engine 5 while acknowledging that the Dragon Engine is "a bit old."

www.ign.com

 

[Dead Man Typing]

I was a little disappointed when I started Ishin and realised it felt like the PS3 gameplay and animations under modern graphics.

But I realised that must be the reason for using Unreal. Maybe it's easier to port old code and data formats to Unreal than it would be to make Dragon Engine compatible. With that in mind, I ended up really enjoying Ishin but I'm glad Dragon Engine is sticking around for future games.

I feel like Dragon Engine has been built to be as efficient as possible when it comes to authoring side quests and mini games. I get the feeling designers can do a lot of cool scripting of cameras, animations and enemy encounters without needing to request code support or new features.

It's the only explanation for how that team is able to put out such large, high quality games at such a fast pace.

Asset reuse only gets you so far. Efficient tools are extremely valuable.

 

[Dinjoralo]

Experimenting with other engines feeds right back into developing the Dragon Engine.
Daytime lighting in 8 improved somewhat thanks to Ishin Kiwami experiments

Click to shrink...

But that doesn't explain the economics of what engine they use and how it affects development. I wanna hear about workflows, and toolsets, and all that! I wanna know if licensing costs are a big factor! I crave knowledge and understanding!

 

[ArchLector]

Because that's why

Click to shrink...

I didn't mean just with Yakuza, but games in general!

 

[rdbaaa]

Don't know what they were thinking with Ishin. Going back to loading if you have to enter a building was a downgrade.

Click to shrink...

yeah, calling this "kiwami" was kind of deceptive if they weren't going to move out of the Y5 framework

 

[Alex de Souza]

Ishin Kiwami was made with unreal engine because it was not a remake like K1 and K2. It was basically the same game as the PS3/4 version, just with a few (bad) changes here and there. Remaking the game on the dragon engine with all the improvements from recent games would be much more difficult.

 

[Lukar]

Why did Ishin! use Unreal? Was it just an opportunity for them to test it out and see what they thought of working with it?

 

[Mocha Joe]

Why did Ishin! use Unreal? As it just an opportunity for them to test it out and see what they thought of working with it?

Click to shrink...

Don't think we have an official answer for that but I'd assume that's probably why

 

[convo]

Why did Ishin! use Unreal? As it just an opportunity for them to test it out and see what they thought of working with it?

Click to shrink...

Well they also ported their in-house automated bug finder into Unreal, a tool that shaves off quite a lot of time from their dev times and a huge reason why their games can come out so fast, so if nothing else trying out tech and seeing what works seems plausible enough if they ever want to consider switching over.

 

[Atolm]

Dragon Engine looked really poor at the beginning (Yakuza 6) but it's fairly ok now.

 

[tiebreaker]

It's solid. If they can improves it bit by bit, it will last them a couple more gens.

 

[Die Squirrel Die]

I do wonder if the clusterfuck with Unity last year and Epic increasing the licensing fee on UE for TV/Movie production might have made the case for keeping an in-house engine and the people with the knowledge of building and maintaining one stronger.

 

[Harmen]

I like how Dragon Engine games look and play, even during daytime.

 

[Wiseblood]

God I love the Dragon Engine