Yep they could directly include in. Id Tech is a beasty engine.
I think it’s a mistake to dictate that all first party use this specific engine. It should be up to the individual developer based on what they are most comfortable with.
It might make sense for 343i to create their own engine (Slipspace), for ID to continue using their own engine for their games, but then you would still want Coalition to continue using Unreal Engine (who is better at using that engine other than Epic itself?).
You get into problems when you pull an EA and force everyone to use something like Frostbite which is an amazing engine for DICE, but not so much for BioWare.
Nothing wrong with developers sharing tech and insight though, and that’s what ID is going to be really helpful with.
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I completely agree. The Coalition and Ninja Theory have become masters of the UE engine and make some of the best looking games in the industry.
Ori (not made by a first party, but I’m using it to demo a point) is considered one of the most beautiful 2D platformer games and is made in Unity. Imagine them trying out a completely different engine.
I will say the argument to save money on licensing fees is incredibly compelling when you factor in the fact that so many of MS’s existing studios are using UE, including Rare. But maybe that’s just all the more reason for MS to buy Epic. 
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Gonna give this a bump and say that if MS really wants Id tech to support Direct X its going to have to start with Id Tech 8 and its going to have to be built from the ground up
I would wager money on MS investing heavily into Id tech and Id Software as a premiere studio for Xbox, possibly even top 5
I hope it becomes X-Tech
Somehow incorporates Forza Tech, Slipspace, and all other internal engines into a super versatile and efficient engine that is available to all 1st party studios and external developers through gamestack. This is obviously not short term, more like a 10 year goal or something, with significant resources in the development of such engine.
And of course, let each studio use whatever they want, but make it the best engine possible so devs actually prefer to work with it
Hell no, idTech is one of the forerunners of Vulkan development in gaming, I’d rather not have that destroyed because they got acquired by a company that does a competing API. Preserving and progressing development of open source platforms and tools is more important to the industry. It’d also go against the supposed hands-off nature of Xbox.
And no, they’d be wasting huge time and money trying to make any in house engine compete in the public space, Unreal will stomp the fuck out of them every single time. Also, most devs in XGS right now use and have used Unreal, in fact some of them are pioneers in the engine leading its future like Coalition and Ninja Theory. Wouldn’t wanna change that.
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Hopefully they’ll be hands off then, if Id Tech 8 wants to stick with Vulkan then its in MS best interest to fuck right off and let Id do what they want.
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There is a potential to look beyond this angle of Vulkan (Mantle) versus Direct3D. These are low level APIs anyway, and most indie studios don’t really play too much at that level. They still work at the middleware levels of Unity versus Unreal or Godot or …
Generally, DirectX is designed first as the Windows OS team has worked very closely with Nvidia and AMD for almost 20 years. All the RDNA2 things going in the arch are actually due to the joint collab of all the three. Particularly, VRS , new Mesh shading pipeline, SFS, and DirectML.
Vulkan, usually, is able to keep track because Nvidia, AMD, and ARM also contribute there. Vulkan implementation can still easily follow DirectX, and so can an idTech version of Vulkan.
But there is a greater potential for idTech folks to be a part of the Graphics architecture team, rather than just creating the game engines AFTER the APIs have been created – which could be Direct3D or Vulkan. Contribute at the source instead; right into the graphics architecture team (silicon design inputs + graphics optimisation inputs). Create both the next version of DirectX APIs and the hardware that a next generation real time graphics engine needs.
Also, continue contributing to Vulkan. I’m sure this new MS is not going to stop them there. The Khronos group might take objection there, but I don’t see why they should.
The second point about in-house engine competing in the middleware space occupied by Unreal: I think that is difficult, and I agree there – you cannot compete head-to-head there. Epic has bought out too many tech teams to be a market leader there, and create a massive gap.
The best way to do this is to promote funding of small indie studios who would like to use any of the XGS engines. Allow ID@Xbox to promote a Game Stack programme that not only funds these indie studios for exclusivity but also provides ANY of the engines for zero-cost usage, alongside LiveOps services like Playfab at a discount.
Unreal as a dependency has to be looked at constantly, only because Epic is a volatile moody company due to Tim Sweeny. Continue working with them as long as things are rosy. However, be ready for his next mood swing too. I have not seen him speak positively about any of his customers. OTOH, he has gone about purchasing the third party tech that his clients have used. For example, the mocap vendor for Ninja Theory was purchased by Epic recently. Very shady, generally.
There is still a huge potential for idTech to be a part of the Gamestack. Just like Amazon Lumberyard which is a fork of the CryEngine.
There is also another interesting idea – get Carmack back! He is more than willing to come back to id. Give him free reign to do anything that he wants. I’m sure even in his idle time, he might come up with something creative.
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MS would be wise to keep investing in idtech. You never know what will happen in the future. What if Apple buys Epic? They would make it exclusive to Apple. Other strange scenarios can happen…
I think they are best off allowing 1P teams (and 2nd party teams) to pick whatever engine they want from MS’s arsenal. Let each engine team build out their tech over time as they see fit, updating with feedback from anyone using them. I’d like to see something akin to the ATG at MS but for engine development with the main tech gurus from each engine team working with the ATG directly to implement some of their new hardware advantages directly into these engines (stuff like VRS, ML, RT, cloud stuff, etc).
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The best engine out there is unreal. That being said, it’s more of jack of all trades kind of thing.
Id tech and slip space are more of specialists kind of engines. They will work wonders for similar kind of games but not for every kind of game.
Yup, same with Frostbite, amazing engine but not good for games like Dragon Age Inquisition
Tango has moved to UE4 and Arkane has kept using their custom fork of idtech 5 instead of keeping pace and using idtech 6/7.
MachineGames is the only studio that has (thus far) kept using the same generation as id. They must have been working very closely since Wolf 2 was an intermediary, described as “closer to 7 than 6”, and sort of a testbed for 7.
I would love to see more people use it rather than all going to Unreal, it’s sooo good for what it does, but I do think it’s unlikely to widely proliferate, no matter which API they use.