It is said that restrictions boost creativity and I've seen artists do amazing things even though their tools were complete crap. Question is how important tools really are. I would argue that vanilla Unity tools are nothing special and yet it's the most used engine in the world and people make amazing games with it.
With my former career as a creative in games dev, I say that's complete crap. I had access to good and bad tools. With the good tools I could experiment and test ideas quickly. With the bad tools I spent too much time just trying to get stuff to work. I would want tools that boost my creativity by giving me freedom, not boosting creativity to be able to finish my tasks.
Maybe you are thinking boosting creativity to work within the limits of the hardware? That's a different topic.
In my experience, vanilla Unity has better tools for creative out-of-the-box then many engines before it.
Oh please, that's the lamest excuse I've seen to skimp on tooling. Abusing your users with poor tools doesn't win you anything.
Self imposed constraints can (and has in many cases) achieved the same thing.
From a technical perspective unity's tools are nothing special, however they work well for non technical users. In the same way UI/UxD for Linux has been a disaster understanding production needs is a complete different space that few engines get right.
It's all just subjective, nothing of this is proven by any research. From my experience from several game studios (I admit the sample is too small to be relevant) quality of their games was inverse to quality of the tools. Stuff like http://www.geek.com/games/a-train-you-ride-in-fallout-3-is-a... is extremely common.
> From a technical perspective unity's tools are nothing special, however they work well for non technical users.
They are nothing special even from non-technical perspective. I'm not saying they are complete crap or that they do not work reasonably, in fact I think they are so successful because they are so simple/average. Of course constantly crashing tool is not boosting your productivity. But simple tools are.
Look at old Unity UI - it was even worse than most open source UI. The new UI is a bit better but still there are open source projects at least equally good. Or animation graphs in Unity. They are quite simple and they have many issues, yet they enable users to do more creative stuff than UE.
