[Vyse]

@VFX_Veteran

What in the name of all that is holy is the sun doing inside that train? If Unreal Engine 5 is so great and revolutionary, why do some of its games continue with this awful not-really-daytime look to them? It's the exact same whenever games incorporate fire into the environment; unnecessarily intense and it looks fake as hell.



"Built on Unreal Engine 5 for great visual quality."

 

[regawdless]

Looks like developer incompetence. My main issue with UE4 is that it's total garbage on PC right now and won't ever get fixed. And with UE5, that it's an engine made for flashy visuals only and not performance, with them slowly working on it but it's not in a good place I'd say.

 

[CAPTAIN RAINCOAT]

@VFX_Veteran

What in the name of all that is holy is the sun doing inside that train? If Unreal Engine is so great and revolutionary, why do some of its games continue with this awful not-really-daytime look to them? It's the exact same whenever games incorporate fire into the environment; unnecessarily intense and it looks fake as hell.

playing Stalker 2 on an oled monitor in a bright room made me look like an Asian until i figured out theres a flashlight button

 

[Dacon]

Looks like developer incompetence. My main issue with UE4 is that it's total garbage on PC right now and won't ever get fixed. And with UE5, that it's an engine made for flashy visuals only and not performance, with them slowly working on it but it's not in a good place I'd say.

becoming an industry staple made them complacent af

 

[Pyrate]

The industry if developers were to adopt open standards like Vulkan and Godot:

 

[Bakkus]

I don't like it either. The art direction feels very cheap and sterile for every 3D "indie" game that uses it. I guess there's no better option for them given how versatile it is, but alas.

 

[WesternBlood]

Maybe they left the coal gate open for the steam boiler?

 

[Chozofication]

It's very adjustable in terms of visual styles, as the new mario and luigi shows as i'm playing it.

My problem with the engine is not the indies and smaller studios that use it, but the studios with money that should be making their own custom engine to suit their needs.

For example let's just use screen space reflections for this ocean so they pop in and out of existence constantly instead of a better custom solution, because it's an easy built in feature.

And of course the biggest issue, certainly for PC users at least ; the stutter that makes games far worse feeling on $5000 pc hardware compared to a $500 console.

For something so widely used it's incredible how many issues just don't get fixed and not enough people are demanding that they be fixed.

 

[regawdless]

It's very adjustable in terms of visual styles, as the new mario and luigi shows as i'm playing it.

My problem with the engine is not the indies and smaller studios that use it, but the studios with money that should be making their own custom engine to suit their needs.

For example let's just use screen space reflections for this ocean so they pop in and out of existence constantly instead of a better custom solution, because it's an easy built in feature.

And of course the biggest issue, certainly for PC users at least ; the stutter that makes games far worse feeling on $5000 pc hardware compared to a $500 console.

For something so widely used it's incredible how many issues just don't get fixed and not enough people are demanding that they be fixed.

Unreal Engine 5 is actually very customizable, not much preventing devs from implementing whatever they want.

The devs of Warhammer Boltgun did a whole new sprite system with physics based gore, sprite brain parts slowly dripping down walls etc. for UE4.

You can do custom solutions and it's 100% on the devs if they decide to not invest any time into those things.

 

[Relativ9]

Both Unreal and Unity could've made a game that looks exactly like this, as others have said its on the devs. Most likely in this case what you've got is a couple of 3D artists and developers, but they have no one who's good at technical art. Likely they're just using preset post-processing, standard shaders, and standard lights (for example I can see there is no cookies on that front light (something that would on its own increase the believability 200%).

I will say though that Unreal does have a fundamental problem, and that's in its marketing. Lumen and Nanite have been marketed as a "it just works" solution to dynamic lighting and LODs, so inexperienced developers just plot a bunch of shit into their scenes and trust the system to take care of it for them. If they've got good artists that know how to build optimized models they can sometimes get away with it, but more often than not Unreal5 games that go for a realistic art style, especially from smaller teams, run horribly. I've seen builds for tiny games that still took up 15GB of disk space, and used 6GB of memory, games that I can guarantee you I could get under 5 and 2 GB respectively with just some very surface-level optimizations.

 

[regawdless]

Both Unreal and Unity could've made a game that looks exactly like this, as others have said its on the devs. Most likely in this case what you've got is a couple of 3D artists and developers, but they have no one who's good at technical art. Likely they're just using preset post-processing, standard shaders, and standard lights (for example I can see there is no cookies on that front light (something that would on its own increase the believability 200%).

I will say though that Unreal does have a fundamental problem, and that's in its marketing. Lumen and Nanite have been marketed as a "it just works" solution to dynamic lighting and LODs, so inexperienced developers just plot a bunch of shit into their scenes and trust the system to take care of it for them. If they've got good artists that know how to build optimized models they can sometimes get away with it, but more often than not Unreal5 games that go for a realistic art style, especially from smaller teams, run horribly. I've seen builds for tiny games that still took up 15GB of disk space, and used 6GB of memory, games that I can guarantee you I could get under 5 and 2 GB respectively with just some very surface-level optimizations.

This. And I'd argue that the devs that don't have enough tech chops to get their basic shit together in UE5, those devs would deliver even worse results without UE5. Imagine them having to build their own engines.

UE5 significantly lowers the barrier of entry to game development, allowing more devs to actually make games. Yes, it has issues and I absolutely hate the PC performance issues and bad CPU utilization of that engine, but I'd still say it's a very good thing that so many devs can now create games without investing a lot of time and non existing money into their own tech.

Also, the industry kinda accepted UE5 as the standard, more or less. You have Nvidia actively working on a branch of the engine with more and more RT and PT improvements flowing into the base engine, you have studios with crazy tech talent like CDPR working with and on UE5 now, actually developing ways to improve data and asset streaming for large open world games etc. UE5 will be fire when next gen hits lol

 

[Relativ9]

This. And I'd argue that the devs that don't have enough tech chops to get their basic shit together in UE5, those devs would deliver even worse results without UE5. Imagine them having to build their own engines.

UE5 significantly lowers the barrier of entry to game development, allowing more devs to actually make games. Yes, it has issues and I absolutely hate the PC performance issues and bad CPU utilization of that engine, but I'd still say it's a very good thing that so many devs can now create games without investing a lot of time and non existing money into their own tech.

Also, the industry kinda accepted UE5 as the standard, more or less. You have Nvidia actively working on a branch of the engine with more and more RT and PT improvements flowing into the base engine, you have studios with crazy tech talent like CDPR working with and on UE5 now, actually developing ways to improve data and asset streaming for large open world games etc. UE5 will be fire when next gen hits lol

I wrote a whole reply talking about why I think we'll see a resurgence of proprietary engines, but then I remembered game design collages. They have fucking ruined the industry. It used to be that you went into game development because you were passionate about programming and games and you were highly adaptable to different languages and methodologies/engines because you had built your development skills back when learning resources were scarce and you kind of just had to try shit out and figure it out. Now people go to game design college, they learn Unreal or Unity, they learn exactly what the need to learn about programming to make solo or small group projects in those engines. And then that is their whole world as far as development is concerned, they have never built a piece of traditional software (and I count myself here), and so the kind of people that would be comfortable switching languages and engines for a new job getting rarer and rarer. And since the game development tools (engines) are more complicated than ever, companies only want to hire people already familiar with those tools at a deeper level.

Back in the day in an interview, it'd be like "oh you helped develop that game, awesome, we use a different tech stack here, but you'll do fine, welcome aboard!" now its: "Oh you used dependency inversion? Sorry, we're actually looking for someone with at least 2 years of experience using Zenject!"

We heard this about the Red engine from CDPR, the reason they switched wasn't cause it was buggy or hard to work with, apparently it was actually not what caused most of 2077's problems, the reason they switched was too many of their senior engineers had left the company and they didn't have enough people left who know how to work and adapt the engine to new systems, AND it was a nightmare to recruit for it since despite also being C++ based, recruits would miss UE5 features and workflows (such as blueprints).

I do think there is room in the AA space for Unity to eat Unreal's cake though, it (can be) a far more performant engine with the introduction of DOTs (ECS) and can allow for more innovative gameplay that flexes the CPU and a bit more rather than just being GPU/memory bound. Unreal has the Mass Entities system but it's kind of super underdeveloped and doesn't seem to be shown a lot of love from Epic. As much as people want Bethesda to switch to Unreal, they might actually have an easier time using Unity with ECS with their design requirements for physics and persistence.

 

[VFX_Veteran]

@VFX_Veteran

What in the name of all that is holy is the sun doing inside that train? If Unreal Engine 5 is so great and revolutionary, why do some of its games continue with this awful not-really-daytime look to them? It's the exact same whenever games incorporate fire into the environment; unnecessarily intense and it looks fake as hell.



"Built on Unreal Engine 5 for great visual quality."

Because the other half of the equation to good looks is artists. That was totally driven by artistic choice. It doesn't have to be there.

Why else do you hate UE?

 

[Optimus]

My problem with the engine is not the indies and smaller studios that use it, but the studios with money that should be making their own custom engine to suit their needs.

And there lies the crux of the problem. Studios with significant monetary backing are the same studios driven by multi-billion dollar publishers who didn't become multi-billion dollar entities by spending lots of money where they don't have/need to. They choose Unreal engine to save money. They opt for a shoddy screen space reflection on water that pops in and out on PC because it's there and cheap.

Only when their investments come back negative due to relying too much on Unreal engine's out of the box features will they adjust.

Still, a major problem for businesses in this industry is that money and effort invested doesn't mean a great return, and the goal isn't to make the best game but the best ROI. Sometimes even a cheap project will have a huge return... and a huge risk project will land flat.

 

[Chozofication]

Unreal Engine 5 is actually very customizable, not much preventing devs from implementing whatever they want.

The devs of Warhammer Boltgun did a whole new sprite system with physics based gore, sprite brain parts slowly dripping down walls etc. for UE4.

You can do custom solutions and it's 100% on the devs if they decide to not invest any time into those things.

Then I guess the issue there is devs looking to use middleware to save time are going to be less likely to put a bunch of time in to customize the tech.