That looks amazing! Was it really done with Godot (albeit modified)? It does not look like a solo dev effort. Unfortunately they may have set themselves a very high bar, as it looks so good, but the actual fighting scenes (of which there were only a few) seemed a bit old fashioned for a modern FPS (like the sniper zoom for instance). Anyway, they have a year to go until release yet, and a delay or two is probably inevitable. I wish them luck though as it does look very good but is in a very competitive genre.
Link below if anyone else wants to watch their promo vid:
People keep asking stuff like this, and I really don’t understand why.
AAA looks like AAA not because of the engine (most of them use ancient engines) but because of the lighting, models, design, and mocap.
This sort of question was common on the UE forums, and I’m sure on the Unity ones too. The answer is always “AAA budgets and teams produce AAA games”.
While AAA is what many say they want, it is also no guarantee of success, just of (usually) pretty amazing graphics.
The original Minecraft (original prototype), Stardew Valley, Flappy Bird, Undertale, most of Roller Coaster Tycoon (graphics and audio outsourced, code all done in x86 assembly) and more are examples of what would be considered successful games and were all solo (mostly) endeavors.
So are you (OP, or whoever) looking for AAA look and feel regardless of game success? Or something that would become quite popular? Or profitable? Or ?
Time and time it is proven that a solo dev can be successful as long as you define what successful means to you. Accomplishment? Sales? Popularity? Something else? Arguably Flappy Bird wasn’t successful for the dev as he took it down and walked away even though he made substantial money from it (50K a day in ad revenue at its peak) as he felt it was too addictive.
Seriously? I doubt Godot would has the maturity to handle the development tasks of Hellblade 2 or Senua, they are really pushing the limits of geometry, shading and animation …
Maybe one from 10 or 12 years ago, easily stuff like 2012 Tomb raider …
Indie and AAA are two completely different budgets, according to some sources. In reality, these are marketing terms that don’t mean anything and prone to constant discussions and outrage.
This is what you pay people to research in the industry, you get a study to tell you if, in this case, godot is capable of accomplishing this.
For fun, I can tell you that, you can compare the technologies of DS and Godot and see what differences exist, what Godot is missing, and what it can do better.
Godot can 100% be used to create a good looking souls-like game, but it also depends on the talent of the people involved, and the budget and time available. Even if you have enough budget and time, that doesn’t guarantee that you will get people capable of making it happen, sometimes they need to work on smaller games first to gain experience and develop the technology required for the bigger game. It is also not a matter of just throwing high quality assets against the wall expecting everything to work out: The whole is bigger than the sum of its parts. You need things like artistic direction and clever composition to create good looking scenes.
These types of AI generated lists are complete nonsense.
This one is straight up a lie, all features get the same priority in the development of godot, regardless of 3D or 2D. In fact, Godot has had many 3D updates in the last versions despite not being used as often as 2D, and most 3D games being stylized.
What does this even mean?
On top of being a weird phrase, since yes, C++ IS faster than everything else, being a lower level language and all, It is NOT a real issue.
This is also implying that Unity is not AAA because it only has C#, which is kinda hilarious.
And that’s a GOOD thing. We are in 2026 and everything uses AGILE.
If you want raw performance you have harder to use engines that specialize on that front, but then you won’t finish a game, not even a demo.
Making something that works comes first, optimization comes second.
No at single AAA company uses out of the box anything.
If this is referring to raytrace, people have implemented it on their own, NVidia themselves being one of them. Godot has no reason to add raytrace to the engine when most of its users don’t need it.
A good looking scene can be achieved with godot’s MANY default rendering techniques, it can do real time shadows, reflections, volumetric fog, screen space shaders, and has a unified PBR workflow, with the ability to change individual materials thanks to forward.
The fact not many people have made good looking games in godot is a matter of scope and skill rather than a problem with the engine.
This sounds like a very newby take. do you have any experience in game development?
As explain by others, AAA is a matter of money.
I also need to add that making a game is a COLLABORATIVE effort, not something a single person can do from their garage, much less something of “high quality”. And it doesn’t matter what you were advertised by AI companies and people trying to sell courses, that is the reality of game development.
The reason godot is not used in AAA games has nothing to do with its capabilities and everything to do with Project Management.
There is a very lengthy and bureaucratic process that needs to be done before starting a project (your game), because the goal is not to “make a good game” but to satisfy the stakeholders, the people who will pay for it.
Because of this, the safest options are used at every single step. Unreal being an engine with 26 years of use in AAA games and used by the majority of AAA games, it gets picked to use in a AAA game.
This is not always the case, many games use their own in-house engine (Baldur’s Gate, CD Project Red), but that has its reasoning too.
Whilst rendering and the editor tools are not as mature, fundamentally there is nothing stopping a game like this being made in Godot. It might not look quite as nice and might take longer to make, but those are not what makes a game ‘AAA’.
I’d argue that the most critical limitation for using Godot to make “AAA” games is that Godot has a number of limitations for working smoothly with very large teams, and while the asset workflows are relatively flexible and can be extended there might be some friction in integration into existing pipelines which the big studios generally have to manage the volume of resources and people involved
Godot also doesn’t (and is unlikely to ever) support a number of proprietary closed formats that big studios might use, and there might be issues with shifting to using formats supported by Godot such as gltf
Yeah i would say Unreal handles denser terrain geometry and foilage much better than Godot.
But Godot can be used to make a good, fast game, with mostly good enough shaders, and will display a lot of HD assets if optimized properly with appropriate art and use of instances.
Thank you everyone for the replies. I’ve been lurking and reading over the past few days, and it seems my original question was a bit vague, badly phrased, or maybe got buried in a wall of text. so, I’d like to clarify a few things:
If “AAA” feels misleading or differs from person to person, let’s say it is either 1) high-fidelity graphics (which is what most people think of), or 2) very complex mechanics and systems, like Genshin Impact or similar titles. It could be the former, the latter, or both, regardless of the budget size.
I know Godot can make these games, but how ready is it right now? Since it’s open-source, I know that with enough time and people, you could probably make a game of any scale or graphical fidelity, even something like GTA VI. But how much time and effort would it take compared to other engines? For example, I don’t want to spend most of the time writing custom engine code instead of actually developing the game (modeling, logic, level design, etc.).
The development, community, and engine itself seem to be built around smaller scale games (this was the long list of text in my original question, or at least what I’ve gathered). Are the developers planning to add features for larger-scale game development soon, or is their focus currently elsewhere?
TL;DR / Better-phrased question: How much work would it take to create a large-scale game in Godot compared to other engines? Are there any upcoming feature updates that will make this easier, or is the development roadmap focused on something else?
These are questions I can’t really find answers to without AAA experience or experience across multiple engines, unless I actually try to build a massive project in both (which would waste years). I could be wrong, but I’m thinking of software development where, if you choose the wrong foundation at the start, you hit massive scalability problems later on to the point where it might be better to just restart. I don’t know if pushing Godot to a massive scale might lead to hitting a wall later if it wasn’t the right choice from the beginning.
I hope this make my question clearer and people can share their insights so I can get a clearer overview of which engine to choose.
Godot does have some stumbling blocks for creating very large game worlds out of the box, but that can be worked around in various ways, but even then “large scale” is an unclear metric, are we talking plainly “large open world” or are we talking large assets, or large volumes of assets, etc.
Having a giant world reusing the same few dozen to few hundred resources is a very different workflow from a world half the size with a hundred times as many assets for example
Also are we talking projects with large teams, or just a small scale team making a large game?
Also are we talking about ease of use for development, i.e. how easy or hard it is to manage large projects, or just the end results, with things like performance and feature support
Your first post sounded like a gauge of where the engine is, now it sounds like you’re asking whether you should start a large scale multi-year project. You still have not given us enough information to answer the latter question. If you want to be vague, you are going to continue to get vague answers.
The question was can it create AAA games though, the definition of a AAA game isnt ‘large game world’.
You could easily do something like FIFA (or whatever its called these days). Fortnite? Yep that wouldnt be too difficult. Rocket League? Sure no problem.
These are all considered AAA games (in the case of Fortnite you could almost consider ‘large scale’), all of which would technically be perfectly possible in Godot.
this.