End Night Games’ The Forest sequel dropped a while ago and it’s a glitchy mess. Glitchy to the point that steam crashed for some reason (we’re not so sure why). It’s probably due to the game engine they’re using or the fact that the game is still in early access. On that topic, what engine does Sons of the Forest use?
Sons of The Forest runs on the Unity 5 Engine. Though first impressions regarding Unity are negative, End Night did a spectacular job at creating a jaw-dropping survival game once again. But considering it’s still in early access and the optimization demand for Unity, there’s a lot of work to be done.
What Engine Does Sons of The Forest Use?
If you aren’t in the game development know-how, you’d be damned to know that End Night games’ pulled off The Forest on the Unity engine. And following their development tradition, they still opted to use Unity 5 for the development of Sons of The Forest.
So why does End Night use Unity, to begin with? We’ve all seen indie games being developed on the Unity engine and seeing the Unity load screen is pretty underwhelming. First impressions always make us think a game on Unity is sure to be a disappointing experience.
But being cheap and offering users a white canvas of sorts, Unity opened the doors to game development which explains the plethora of unfinished and unpolished games on the forefront of Unity, and in the upper echelons, there’s Sons of the Forest.
Maybe End Night didn’t have the budget to develop an in-house game engine from scratch which could explain their reliance on Unity. Unity is also pretty easy to work with when deploying games across multiple platforms.
And then there are the negatives of Unity which are optimization issues. Sure, low-spec hardware can handle simple 3D games on Unity, but upping the ante in terms of visual fidelity, Sons of The Forest and Unity don’t mix well. Unity really demands optimization which isn’t quite feasible considering the game still isn’t finished.
Conclusion
It might all come down to the fact that the developers for Sons of The Forest had been working closely with Unity from the get-go and keeping that in mind, it would be pretty unfeasible to make a transition to another open-source engine like Unreal Engine 5, despite its plethora of benefits.
All in all, Sons of the Forest runs on Unity but does a great job at looking great at the cost of optimization that is. But considering the game is still in early access, a few optimization patches are expected in the future. Hey, you get what you pay for!