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"Unreal Engine is Killing Games" - Vex

intbal

Member
Was going to mention UE3 as well.
Now that was bad.

All of these are UE3.
None of them look bad.

8tPb7nT.jpeg
 

DenchDeckard

Moderated wildly
The whole industry fell for the unreal engine hype train in 2020.

They had the perfect marketing plan. Team up with the biggest console platform. Make it sound like it was special to ps5...by bot talking about other platforms at pc.

They shaped the hype of the engine through console warring, like marketing geniuses. We all fell for it.

The reality is, we got a nightmare of an engine with stutter and other issues.

This isn't the first time with unreal engine either. It always launches hot and takes years to iron out. Then they release a new version. We have fallen for it before. So who is to blame?

Really poor engine.
 

Seider

Member
Unreal Engine 5 was designed for running 30 fps games 1440p on this console gen, just like Matrix Demo shows.

And just like it was with Unreal Engine 4, Unreal Engine 3, Unreal Engine 2, etc

Was Gears of War running at 60 fps in Xbox 360 when it was released? No.

Was Unreal Championship on Xbox running at 60 fps? No.

Batman Arkham Knight at 60 fps on Ps4? No.

But now people wants 60 fps so Unreal Engine 5 is shit.

I think Unreal Engine 5 is fine... the current videogame users are who dont understand 60 fps needs a lot more power tan 30 fps.
 

Dr.D00p

Member
UE is a marketing tool to lock in licensing fees.

Show a shiny, new tech demo every few years with all these super cool new features, 'mega lights' being the latest, to the development community and BOOM!. Where do we sign up.

Trouble is, the technology is still another 1 or 2 generations of PC graphics cards & home consoles away from being able to run any of this shit at satisfactory performance levels. And some of the flaws in UE are so fundamental (traversal sutter ) that only a complete, ground up re-write will fix it.
 

Felessan

Member
its disgusting how 90% of the industry have decided to all coalesce onto this one unoptimized, slow and resource-heavy engine with terrible performance on all platforms.
If guys can't do it with off-the-shelf engine, imagine their "product" if they had to make their own engine

Off-the-shelf engines existed for a long time as not everyone has time, money and expertise to create their own engine. And as a tech become more and more sophisticated, the pure economic of creating engine with all those fancy features for 1-2 games just has little sense.
 

AW_CL

Member
The issue isn't with the Unreal Engine itself but with the current priorities in game development. The excessive focus on achieving 60 FPS and smooth performance often comes at the cost of creative vision and technical innovation. This obsession with frame rates leads to games that feel uninspired, visually bland, and lacking in impact. Ultimately, it is not the Unreal Engine that is ruining games but the misguided priorities of developers and the expectations of the community.

In short, a big thank you to all the 60 FPS fanatics for turning this console generation into a soulless, uninspired mess.
 
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mdkirby

Gold Member
My computer is really struggling with STALKER 2, but Robocop looked fantastic and ran great on it. I think its mainly a problem for larger, fully open world games.
I think in this case it’s mostly a matter of the devs have other more important things to be doing, like….fighting an actual war from actual invading armies and not fictional ones. Many of the devs serve in the Ukrainian military. Most cities also have rolling black outs at varying times and daily air raids where they need to take shelter. It’s not exactly conducive to a well optimized game.
 

The Cockatrice

I'm retarded?
Its an engine that relies on frame-gen and dlss to run decent/good which is horrible. DLSS and frame-gen were solutions to run games with demanding visual settings like pathtracing and what not, not as crutches for basic visuals. Unreal 3.5 was the best.
 

Pandawan

Member
I really don't understand how a game in 2024 can look as bad as Stalker 2. Sometimes this game looks like it's not much better than UE3 games. It's blurry, soapy, grenades look like the shells of f-ing Kinder chocolate eggs - like they're made of plastic, damn all the objects in this game looks like they are molded from plasticine, , objects appear in front of you, shadows flicker. Sometimes, especially indoors and at night, the first Stalker looks better graphically! During the day, yes, sometimes Stalker 2 can be pretty. Sometimes. And still blurry.

VTnse7W.png

4gMWquy.png
 
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winjer

Member
its disgusting how 90% of the industry have decided to all coalesce onto this one unoptimized, slow and resource-heavy engine with terrible performance on all platforms.

Very true. We used to have several competing third party game engines. Such as Criware, idTech, Cryengine, Unity, etc.
For some reason, most studios picked the game engine that has the most performance issues.
And yes, UE can sometimes look really good. But most often than not, it runs like terrible.
 

nkarafo

Member
The way i see it is that a developer has two options:

- Make their own engine
- Use Unreal but use it properly, optimize it, learn it well, etc.

Anything less than that is lazy.

I have seen this with other projects. For instance, in the Titanic project, when the team changed, they also changed the engine to Unreal 4. But when doing so, there were some very obvious visual issues, like the auto-exposure was very intense and the ship would have a blinding white color during daytime that hurt your eyes. Turns out the new developers just left every Unreal engine setting at default. They didn't even test anything to see what looks better/worse. After the complains all they had to do was adjust the exposure settings of the engine and fiddle with them for a few minutes and, voila, the game now looks much more tolerable.

It's just laziness.


Today's games dont give a shit anymore about optimization because of all the upscale shenanigans, we are reaching points where soon games will be rendered in sub 720p and then reconstructed to 4k lol.
Upscalers still can't fix traversal stutters or shader cache stutters.

There is no technology that can fix laziness or incompetence. Except maybe when AI completely replaces human developers.


Unreal Engine 4 was originally designed to be licensed by studios, who then customise the engine to best suit what their game needs.
over the years it sadly became more and more common for devs to just use the default version of the engine, with all its bloat, which is not optimised for any specific genre or type of game design.

Epic Games then started catering to these types of devs, making the engine a jack of all traits and easier and easier to use. this in return allowed worse and worse developers to makes games with it. which then slowly leads to worse and worse optimised games by worse and worse developers.
The Office Thank You GIF
 
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rofif

Can’t Git Gud
I agree. It limits creativity and optimisation to what the engine allows.
But most importantly, it’s a great tool if you use their features like lumen etc. But if you want to solve your lighting differently or use other solutions, then it’s a problem.
And ue solutions are expensive to use for what they deliver. These are pc focused and mainly high end pc focused.

I don’t think stalker2 for example looks justifiably good for its performance And that goes for many ue5 games like silent hill2 remake. It looks worse than tlou part1 or 2 which both are 80fps perfect image quality, just immaculate graphics.
 
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Mayar

Member
Lack of desire of publishers to spend extra money and time on optimization of games kills games + lack of time for development and lack of experience on the part of the developer. It just so happened that there are not so many engines on the market now, and no one can compete with Unreal, therefore in most cases games are released on it and we encounter them more often and see problems more often. But on the same Unity there are enough games that work just as badly for the same reasons.
 
riiight the massively scalable and customizable engine is the issue and absolutely not the devs who just put it on default settings and call it a day.......
.....
..
.
 

daninthemix

Member
UE sucks. It's a lowest-common-denominator engine that weirdly makes every game look somehow the same, even when they have different art styles, and ensures that no game looks exceptional, merely 'fine'. And of course, it's plagued by intractable performance issues.
 

mèx

Member
If you don't have the technical know-how and engineering resources to customize chunks of UE5, then you're going to have a bad time. At least for open world games.

Using it stock seems a recipe for badly optimized games. This is why I'm always worried when UE5 is mentioned... I really hope Square Enix doesn't switch to UE5 for FFR Part 3.
 
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Mr.Phoenix

Member
I agree.

While I think it's an engine with some great features, I think Unreal's next major update shouldn't add a single new feature but rather optimize the hell out of the engine so that every feature they have costs at least a third or half the frame time to implement.
 

Seider

Member
The issue isn't with the Unreal Engine itself but with the current priorities in game development. The excessive focus on achieving 60 FPS and smooth performance often comes at the cost of creative vision and technical innovation. This obsession with frame rates leads to games that feel uninspired, visually bland, and lacking in impact. Ultimately, it is not the Unreal Engine that is ruining games but the misguided priorities of developers and the expectations of the community.

In short, a big thank you to all the 60 FPS fanatics for turning this console generation into a soulless, uninspired mess.
Getting 60 fps in almost every game is something we had to achieve some day. Its going to be hard times doing it but its necessary.

Problem is Unreal Engine 5 was designed for 30 fps 1440p games in this gen. Epic thought this gen would be the same as last 3 console gens... but no. Now people want 60 fps. And i understand both sides.

Nice thing is now we got Ps5 Pro so Unreal Engine 5 should not be an issue in that console.
 
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RaySoft

Member
There are plenty Unreal games released in a much better polished state.

It takes dev's dedication to optimize ambitious games.
Most of the optimization gains are done inside a games engine. When your puzzle consists of four big puzzle pieces, there aren't many different ways to complete it.
 
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Hayriko

Member
I really don't understand how a game in 2024 can look as bad as Stalker 2. Sometimes this game looks like it's not much better than UE3 games. It's blurry, soapy, grenades look like the shells of f-ing Kinder chocolate eggs - like they're made of plastic, damn all the objects in this game looks like they are molded from plasticine, , objects appear in front of you, shadows flicker. Sometimes, especially indoors and at night, the first Stalker looks better graphically! During the day, yes, sometimes Stalker 2 can be pretty. Sometimes. And still blurry.

VTnse7W.png

4gMWquy.png
Those grenades feels like it will stalk me in my dreams now
 

Connxtion

Member
… grenades look like the shells of f-ing Kinder chocolate eggs - like they're made of plastic…..

4gMWquy.png
That’s how they actually look, RGD-5 grenade.
800px-Rgd_5_hand_grenade.jpeg


But yeah, would have preferred an upgraded X-ray engine. UE5 especially earlier versions is crud.

A think every dev using it, if they are still in development should be updating to the latest stable released by epic before release of their game. A know it’s won’t as simple as flicking a switch, but the benefits of newer fixes and optimisation should out way the graft to update it.
 

Portugeezer

Member
UE always the same shit since PS360.

Capable of amazing things, but only about 5% of developers are able to achieve those heights.

Would be cool to see Epic push the engine in a game that isn't Fortnite.
 

StereoVsn

Gold Member
Unreal engine itself is just not well suited to optimization out of the box it seems unless developers know very well what they are doing.

Unfortunately most studios don’t have a lot of competent senior engine programmers (not just “devs”) who can properly customize and then optimize Unreal.

A lot of senior developers got burned out and left as a result of brutal hours, and contractor happy industry. So you have a lot of folks now in roles that they are not well suited for.

I mean look at recent EA’s Jedi games. Both games have awful performance, stuttering, and more. This is from a high budget, high profile studio within EA. And there are many such examples out there.

And yeah, it’s a damn shame CDPR went away from REDEngine to Unreal. Once they fixed Cyberpunk, it’s just so amazingly scalable and performant.
 

REDRZA MWS

Member
Walking Glancing GIF

imagine thinking that.
What is igneous looking for? An engine designed on high end pc’s, to suddenly run flawless on these toaster oven consoles?

I don’t have to tell you a PC runs its own discreet cpu, gpu, and more RAM.

UE5 will get better and better once they optimize and trim some fat.
 

Bashtee

Member
All of this has been coming for a long time. High turnover, chasing trends, sinking millions into tech that nobody needs or wants (NFT, blockchain, perhaps AI?).

How can you maintain software if the people who work with and on it leave the company faster than you can onboard new hires? It's not sustainable. Easy way out? Take an engine that someone else maintains for you, and you can hire people who have already worked with the engine. There is no need for extra training on software nobody else in the world is using.

I'm not sure where Unity3D is going these days, but I remember how people got turned off the moment the logo appeared. There are a couple of open-source engines, but none got enough traction. They simply don't have the Fortnite $. All we can do is hope that Unity3D and UE get better. I'd like to see another engine get some big support, but it's pretty unlikely at this point.
 

rodrigolfp

Haptic Gamepads 4 Life
Is it??? PS1, PS2, PS3 and PS4 gens were all about crap performance (KZ2 180/150ms input lag lol) but suddenly this gen is being killed because UE engine performance???

Unreal Engine and its consequences have been a disaster for gaming
But Shadow of the Colossus dropping to 10 fps on PS2 was amazing gaming?? Or Crysis running on only 2 cores was amazing gaming??
 
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Mayar

Member
Is it??? PS1, PS2, PS3 and PS4 gens were all about crap performance (KZ2 180/150ms input lag lol) but suddenly this gen is being killed because UE engine performance???
Well, this is not quite a correct comparison, it would be like if I wrote - when I was young and handsome, I had a 166 MMX pertium and a 60 Hz screen and a dead Genius mouse with 2 buttons and a ball. And nevertheless, we played Quake 2 on a software render (3dfx cost a lot of money) at 640 x 480 and somehow managed to hit 4 running pixels on the screen with a 180 degree turn with a rail gun. Now people have 400 Hz screens, mouse with a laser, 3D accelerators - and players can't hit a can that is 20 meters away from them. Times were different, we played as best we could =)))
 
The Unreal Engine is not bad necessarily but it is certainly not as easy to work with as initially thought. It can work well. Gears 5 ran at 60fps on the Xbox One. The game did everything that apparently the engine struggles with including open world like areas without the stuttering. How is is possible then? It's simple, the Coalition really understands the engine. Many developers are just using it assuming it's like magic and will just automatically work but it clearly takes effort. Better to use your own property engine that you understand like ID Tech etc.
 

rodrigolfp

Haptic Gamepads 4 Life
Well, this is not quite a correct comparison, it would be like if I wrote - when I was young and handsome, I had a 166 MMX pertium and a 60 Hz screen and a dead Genius mouse with 2 buttons and a ball. And nevertheless, we played Quake 2 on a software render (3dfx cost a lot of money) at 640 x 480 and somehow managed to hit 4 running pixels on the screen with a 180 degree turn with a rail gun. Now people have 400 Hz screens, mouse with a laser, 3D accelerators - and players can't hit a can that is 20 meters away from them. Times were different, we played as best we could =)))
No, we didn't, as there were also games running much better while looking on par or better. Some games/engines pushes stuff further "ahead" of it's time, some are badly optimized, some are good all around. Nothing basically changed.

You have to recompile shaders every time you launch the game… lmao
Not an engine problem.
 
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Laptop1991

Member
I've never been impressed with UE5 so far, so this doesn't surprise me, we need more engine's as competition like it used to be in the past so Epic then has to improve and fix their software, they don't seem to be bothering much to me, so the issues with UE5 still remain.
 

Buggy Loop

Member
Developers aren’t up to par either. Just look at DX12.

For sure

When within 24h script kiddies find the hex file to insert ultrawide support, while devs working on the game for like 4~6 years on it would comment on community page that it's too much work to support ultrawide and its niche... Pretty fucking telling.

That's also what happens when you go for off the shelve engines. Studios used to have graphic engine engineers and big nerds that would develop it in-house. Modern game development on UE is now full of juniors looking at support forums for their code, regardless of how optimized the solution they find is.
 
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