TheTechNerdAll Games Confirmed To Be Using Unreal Engine 5 So Far
LouNekoI want to rant real quick.
I want to preface this by saying I’m not a game developer, but I have played a fair share Unreal Engine games and my honest opinion as a consumer is that it is a literal plague especially in the indie game world. Show me 1 second of gameplay of any game and I could tell you with 100% certainty whether it’s an unreal engine game or not. And the main issue isn’t the engine itself, I bet its a fine engine that can do everything that a developer needs it to do.
The main issue in general gaming but most noticeably in UE is the absolute horrible TAA antialiasing. Somehow we went from crisp and sharp looking games in 2010 to absolutely blurry messes today. UE is the biggest offender, every single on of their games uses TAA as its main AA method and only with the sharpening filter turned to a 100, is it barely serviceable. And on top of the blurriness you have visual artifacts especially in Picture-in-Picture (PiP) rendering, so forget realistic scopes or mirrors or particle effects. And if you decide to use any other method for AA, all the characters hair looks like an unacceptable flickering wiremesh. We always see these tech demos of amazing lighting and huge open landscapes rendered in realtime with UE but it all amounts to nothing if everything is blurred beyond recognition.
The second biggest gripe is the abysmal performance. Sure if a game looks good you can expect it to be a little bit more demanding on the hardware side. But thanks to TAA, no UE game actually looks good. So you’re just left with the hardware demands. But in the past, if your PC couldn’t handle a game at max setting you just tone them down a little bit and “viola” your game runs good. That is absolutely impossible with UE. I have 3 UE games that I regularly play, and the difference between lowest and max settings on all of them is ~5 FPS. So your game looks like a PS2 game and you get barely any performance gain, awesome, good job UE. Not to mention that in an attempt to maximize “performance” most NPCs that are further than 50m are rendered at 5 FPS, looks realy good on those big open landscapes with amazing lighting.\
I am sure that all of those problems are solved if the engine is in the hands of a talented developer that knows what their doing and puts value on visual clarity and performance. But that is not what the vast majority of UE developers do. UE feels to me like a modular package. You just slap things together and it supposedly works. But you can’t expect to create art by just slapping things together. It also feels like UE tries to become the jack of all trades but master of none to appeal to the broadest market so that Epic can cash in on all that licensing money.
These are real issues but what is the alternative?
Most other engines are not better. Creating a new engine is very expensive, takes time, and is risky.
It seems like Unity is the go to engine for 2D applications. But I’m always surprised how much developers can squeeze out of it for 3d games. Konami could get their heads out of their asses and sell the Fox Engine or make it publicly available since they aren’t using it anymore. The CryEngine always looked stellar and is available for licensing.
I just dont understand, is the Unreal Engine so much cheaper and better for development than any alternative? Is Epics support better than any competitors? Why does it seem like every 2nd indie or double A title uses UE?
We also have more and more developers transfer to UE for sequels even if they already have a working engine. (Insurgency: Source, Insurgency Sandstorm: Unreal)
CoelacanthCDPR are switching from their proprietary Red Engine to UE5 as well.
ScrubblesYeah anyone who says that studios should just develop an engine or that it’s not that hard should look to cyberpunk. Most bugs there were engine related, and all of its performance woes were too.
I’m actually sad, it ended up being a fine engine after they fixed it up for a year, and it’d be nice to have some more alternatives to unreal
I completely agree, on both counts. I’m sad about the demise of Red Engine too, especially since the look of Cyberpunk was one of the things they nailed. Not just graphically, but things like small character movement animations during dialogues and facial expressions.
I’m fearful that the upcoming Cyberpunk 2 (when it releases in 10 years) will lose a lot of identity by being Unrealified.
QuokkaThose character animations are an engine agnostic problem. That’s on the art department, any engine can handle it with ease.
That’s possible. I know rigging for facial expressions used to be a big thing and was very different between engines, but at this point perhaps every option is at a sufficient enough level for it not to matter.
Our studio uses Godot. It’s fantastic and open source.
I just watched the 2022 desktop/console showcase, I’ve only played Brotato and Cassette Beasts (Switch) out of all of them. Looks very clean but so far mostly focuses on 2D and 2.5D games. I also saw a VR game in the showcase. Looks very interesting.
It is great for 2D. The 3D is definitely getting there, but it’s not on the same level as Unreal or Unity yet. I think within a year or two, It should catch up to Unity at least though. We’re super pleased with it.
beefcatUnreal is way more versatile and easier to use than CryEngine, and a lot more capable for AAA game development than Unity. Looking at UE5, none of these alternatives have equivalents for features like Nanite or Lumen.
I’ve seen the presentation of Nanite and Lumen a month ago and they seem like very interesting technologies. I still haven’t seen a game implement Nanite to get a significant performance boost though. Lumen is more of a filmmakers tool, since lighting in games is often preferred to be more stylized than realistic. But this also brings up another issue with UE. The constant updates distract developers from actually fulfilling their vision and finishing the game. Early Access titles often stagnate development to update to a new engine version and implement new technologies, instead of providing content and bugfixes. And if you don’t update the to a new engine, the community whines about it. So the devs have no choice. The versitality has its price, it’s like UE tries to become jack of all trades, but master of none in an effort to provide everybody with a platform.
Lumen is not a filmmakers tool. Fortnite is already using it in production on current gen consoles, and Immortals of Aveum will be using it exclusively when it launches later this month.
Vengefu1 TunaAnother big factor is developer engine knowledge. It’s expensive to train developers on a new or unpopular engine when you can hire plenty of devs who are already familiar with a popular engine like Unreal. 343i continues to have this issue with Halo Infinite running on their Slipspace engine, which is why (IIRC) they’re switching to Unreal for future games.
There isn’t a great alternative. SSAA is way too expensive, and old anti-aliasing techniques do not work well with shader-heavy games or really fine detail.
The fucktaa crowd would rather just live with really nasty shimmering and other artifacts of aliasing, or they have obnoxiously expensive setups that can drive SSAA or displays with really high pixel densities. Personally I think they’re crazy.