Unreal Engine 5 is Ruining Gaming...

[@blueshattrick]

These studios have fired everyone who understood how their internal engines worked.. they HAVE to use UE5

[@stevekramerf242]

Yep, nobody talks about that fact.

[@ledzep1023]

@@stevekramerf242remember for the beginning of Halo Infinite when they just had a revolving door of employees coming in, learning the engine and then right as they figure it out, they’re either gone or fired and someone new comes in. It was something to that effect but basically they never really had people fully learn and understand their own engine and just had constantly changing employees

[@SnakeEngine]

Did they? Perhaps those people are overqualified and too expensive.

[@EggEnjoyer]

@@SnakeEngineToo expensive & over qualified = Not a fresh out of college kid and actually has experience

[@SnakeEngine]

@@EggEnjoyer Yep, but to be fair, not an engine problem.

[@mozax8118]

It's crazy that Batman Arkham Knight was made with an upgraded version of Unreal Engine 3.

[@trashboatex]

Finally, someone is pointing this out! There is nothing stopping studios from making this type of game using prebaked lighting and other optimization techniques. It's developer neglect and overliance on next generation hardware that's the problem not unreal engine.

[@TheVisualDigitalArts]

I did not know that thats insane.

[@DaDoubleDee]

Seriously??? I thought it was an upgraded UE4

[@fatalk01]

yep same with mortal kombat 11

[@cunnyman]

@@DaDoubleDeeit was released when UE4 was just released lol

[@Opnn8d1]

Unreal Engine is not killing gaming. The gaming industry is killing gaming.

[@raskolnikov6443]

Screw UE

[@asrr62]

no unreal is a major culprit. who wants to play games at 10 fps.

[@simplepointstudio6210]

@@asrr62 Developers who don't know how to use the engine. Don't blame the tool, blame the artist.

[@Opnn8d1]

​@@asrr62 And you're running said games with a system that has the recommended specs? If not, then THAT is your problem. Not the engine. The ENGINE is not going to put a limit on what the developer wants to throw into it. But what the developer throws into it may put a limit on the performance the player gets out of it. You could always buy a more advanced machine if you want to run things with all the settings maxed out.

[@bokan1056]

As if everyone NEEDS to use Unreal Engine

[@GusMix79]

UE censoring language is very concerning. I was not aware of that. This is a very dangerous step. Imagine the canvas producer tells the artist what to paint or not to paint and if the artist paints something the canvas company disagrees they can take the picture / art away from the artist. Art should be protected and free from censorship at all costs. It’s a part of freedom of speech.

[@AFCMS]

It's wrong, and many anti-woke influencers and persons who aren't developers make the same mistake. The "inclusion" policy doesn't apply to games, it applies to code you want to contribute back to Unreal and Epic Games. A LOT of projects have this kind of policy actually, including much more important ones like the Linux kernel. This kind of policy sucks, but it doesn't apply to things you make with it and isn't nearly as bad as game censorship.

[@gamesthatmatter9374]

@@AFCMS are u crazy ? this is the canary in the coal mine ! from code to game content . when you people will learn . god please nuke this planet . let it start fresh

[@Sneaky1ne]

Dont take the youtoober's words as fact. This guy doesn't seem to know much by his own admission.

[@randomname2914]

Brainrot

[@TheUltimateHacker007]

That and the firing of employees and closing studios to make new ones under new direction makes sense. They're setting the stage for an unreal monopoly

[@Vartazian360]

Lets not forget that ALMOST EVERY UE5 game that comes out has massive stuttering issues on pc. The engine has all these amazing features, and KEEPS adding more crazy features, but fails on the most fundamental level: deliver smooth consistent frames.

[@HellPedre]

90% of games developed in UE (which you clearly have no idea about) has ZERO stutters, literally the stutter issue is on the very few exceptions where you notice them because devs are lazy AF, most UE games have no issues at all, otherwise no one would use it.

[@Vartazian360]

@HellPedre what in the world are you talking about dude?? Its widely known issue that this engine has massive traversal stutter issues that have to do with the world partition system loading a huge amount of assets as you cross into the next partition. This in addition to other stutters. There are VERY FEW examples of UE5 games not stuttering. Black Myth Wukong is one such game.

[@alleosussquirt8041]

We need to make games able to run on more hardware not just the latest most expensive stuff. It's what happened that killed consoles by trying to sell the most expensive graphics and nothing more.

[@maximusdecimus23]

I agree with that bro

[@philcollins5890]

Yeah, at least the last gen consoles.

[@lokionthecomeup]

Look what they did with stalker 2. Recommended specs is a 2080 on UE5.

[@metallboy25]

There are plenty of indie games that run on potato hardware. 🤷

[@aHungiePanda]

That mindset is the reason Xbox doesnt get some games day 1

[@congoredjr]

UE5 is the sign that video games are going/have gone from art form to quickly mass produced corporate product.

[@randomcommenter10_]

isn't that more of an issue with the game developers themselves though? I feel Unreal is being scapegoated from the real issue here which is modern AAA developers just being bad nowadays

[@congoredjr]

@randomcommenter10_ no shortage of blame to go around, but Epic is making what we are seeing possible by creating the engine, the environment it can thrive in was created by others, but speaking on them on youtube is verbotin.

[@josephmorelli3408]

Except now games take 8-10 years to make.

[@Sweenus987]

It wouldn't make sense to have to rebuild everything all the time for every game. UE5 is a tool and a natural part the games industry evolution

[@marekkos3513]

YES

[@VisibleToeHead]

Honestly, the performance issues could be overcome, but having the looming eye of HR over devs is going to neuter creativity.

[@Testicool96]

Unreal Engine is an amazing tool. Its the lifeless corporate developers using it as a crutch that are ruining gaming.

[@ping_th]

agree

[@divinecomedian2]

Sure, but as long as the crutch exists, we can criticize it too. Maybe if UE was easier to customize to get more distinct visuals then more games using it wouldn't look so bland. Hopefully the tool improves to accommodate that.

[@dheerajrao2179]

​@@divinecomedian2what are you talking about bro no big studio or even AA ones will use default UE they'll get the source code and modify it as they need. It's always been that way.

[@ChaosReaper426]

​@divinecomedian2 if you are skilled at back end it is easy to make your own visual style with UE5. look at sparking zero. However, ue5 makes it easier to make high quality visuals. So they just go with that.

[@alexanderjamesreed935]

Its really not. Watch some threat interactive videos. I like to refer to it as the engine for the lazy and uninspired.

[@SickPrid3]

reasons why UE is getting a monopoly 1. developers tend to work with it the most, so you have more heads to choose from making it cheaper 2. developing in-house engine cost money and every new person hired needs time to get used to it making it even more costly as, always... it's all about money

[@godkekliveshere431]

yeah figures

[@Billy-bc8pk]

This is wrong on so many levels -- building your own proprietary engine is far cheaper in the long run; you aren't paying royalties to someone else per revenue scale in perpetuity. It's why EA kept hold of the Frostbite for so long. Yes, people have to train up and the refactors cost money, but refactoring any engine costs money and many studios had to refactor various iterations and branches of the Unreal Engine anyway, such as Arc System Works, BioWare (for ME1), Silicon Knights, and Caged Element to name but a few. You are right that there are more people to easily choose from to work on the engine, but they have almost no experience in making high-level content using low level languages, meaning you are not getting quality engineers. In turn, it also means you are not getting quality products, and this is being mirrored in the absymal sales revenue. If it were actually about money then publishers would invest in engineers to make games that sell (like they did during the aughts with the sixth and seventh gen consoles). If they actually wanted to make money, they would not be throwing millions away on consultancy firms like SBI while losing top-tier engineers who can maintain and support their engine.

[@godkekliveshere431]

@@Billy-bc8pk go build an game engine then let's see if you can practice what you preach or ppl like you only talk no actions you think game dev its easy and AAA games are fast to make fine do it you cowards prove us all wrong if you can pulled off or else you opinion officially wont matter and everyone is allowed to use what they feel like it

[@ping_th]

Unity is much more popular? (I’m a ue user)

[@godkekliveshere431]

@@ping_th no but i do use other game engines like construct or cry engine or flax engine or wicked engine . who said epic has no competition

[@RealityCheck6969]

Developers will be easy to replace. Employees will have less power in the company. Which means they will work for less. Management loves these things.

[@richardPhilips2]

Actually developers have tons of power in AAA studios too much probably, I heard from a manager and everything has to be discussed everything has to be put to the vote , it's bottom up not top down , and most AAA are way over staffed , ubisoft has 20000 people!!! Come on no way do they need that many

[@yazcona13]

Room temperature iq take. Better to use UE5 because these game companies cant make a good game engine for their lives. Let them stick to their lane. Which is making games

[@coreytaylor3633]

This is absolutely nonsense and shows you know absolutely nothing about game development

[@unseen_stream]

Thanks god that developers will be easy to replace. Have you ever worked with "feature freak" who has a god complex?

[@mehrankhan7871]

The capitalist pipe dream or replacing workforce with machines is just that, a pipe dream.

[@eddebrock]

While UE needs competent competition, the problem is not UE, it's the suits that want to save money by not bothering with an in-house engine.

[@Vinnie_PT]

"the problem is not UE" You never watched a Threat Interactive UE5 analysis video before, have you?

[@frizkedblizz]

@@Vinnie_PT fr

[@MostlyPennyCat]

Counterpoint though, many studios ditched UE4 for the the 8th gen consoles and I swear I remember this desert of releases while every studio wrote their own brand new engine.

[@alwaysquestionyouropinions1119]

Yet the same people will spend millins upon millions on marketing rather than make a good game. If something is crap no amount of marketing will save it. Just look at the new dragon age.

[@dathedix3951]

@@Vinnie_PT I've only watched a few of Threat's videos but in the cases I've scene it still mostly looks like developers not taking the time to properly optimize their assets / shaders / scenes etc. more so than Unreal's fault. The reality of optimization is that what is and isn't ok to do is really going to depend on your use case so the engine and the engine can't decide if / when to use a feature for you.

[@sinister9111]

Finally someone saying it. UE5 and ray tracing has ruined game performance and gaming.

[@cxngo8124]

And platform greed. 1080ti was $700 usd. Adjusted for inflation it should be $900 dollars. But instead we got a 4080 at $1200 that was not very appealing because they wanted to push you to a 4090. All the new CPU launches have had minor perfomance gain (5% AMD 9000 series or loss in perfomance intel core ultra) but the games keep getting more demanding. Consoles are also getting more expensive while giving you less in terms of perfomance. Think ps5 pro. The whole industry is a mess.

[@tormdk5879]

Why is ray tracing an issue? Because you don't have the hardware to support it?

[@MeltonCrest]

@@tormdk5879 Because ray tracing is pointless, how about they focus on making proper games instead of obsessing over how fire and water looks or making high res realistic onions, nobody gives a damn about that.

[@NicholasBrakespear]

@@tormdk5879 Because new visual gimmicks like that tend to have a downward reach - which is to say, when you don't have the hardware to support it, the other graphical techniques start to suffer because the game wasn't targeting them. Indeed, a direct result of the ray tracing fad has been the increasing reliance on scaling techniques to boost performance, meaning that every game is using FSR/DLSS and TAA, resulting in hazy averaged-out visuals that really really don't work well at 1920x1080, which is still the dominant resolution for gaming. To put it another way, it now requires increasingly expensive hardware just to make a modern game look not aggressively bad.

[@afraeemsakib4588]

​@@tormdk5879 oh bo ho Like i would give a f to a reflection that ruining the performance of the game Commenting like 10 years old spoiled brat

[@lazycakes360]

The engine isn't at fault. It's just a tool. The game developers (and publishers to an extent) themselves are responsible for the vision of the game, such as the artstyle. It's just the artstyles that have stagnated. This has nothing to do with UE5.

[@plinyvicgames]

yeah this is a classic case of people thinking that the engine completely drives the visuals and function of a game. this video is completely uninformed on most points and is blatant misinformation on others.

[@zaofactor]

It's in fact more of a publisher issue than a dev studio one. If dev teams were given the time and money to work on and develop with their own engines, this wouldn't be noteworthy. It's basically a case of collapsing corporate greed.

[@lazycakes360]

@@zaofactor Not everyone has the time nor money nor desire to develop their own engines if existing, competent ones exist out there. If there's not a real reason to develop your own engine, then don't. Studios use UE5 to save time and money, two precious things in the business world, not because they're "soulless corporations." You're attacking the wrong target here.

[@zaofactor]

@lazycakes360 Tell that to Take Two, EA, and Ubusoft. Publishers are the problem, not the dev studios. These companies were making enough money as it was, but they needed more, because they sold themselves to those who always want more. This caused them to squeeze dev studios to smaller and smaller teams with constantly smaller deadlines to meet demand. It's definitely a publisher issue, not a dev studio one.

[@lazycakes360]

@@zaofactor I didn't say whose issue is was. I think these corporations suck but it isn't an engine issue.

[@FeliPeltier]

When CDPR went U5 I immediately knew it was going to be the beginning of the end for them

[@metallboy25]

DEI was the beginning of the end 😂

[@I-Dcompany]

Heyyy Cyberpunk worked out

[@user0K]

Naah, they had so much troubles with their own engine. That art team was often blocked by the engine team, because of missing features

[@DarkSoul-pb6dv]

they ruined the witcher 3 performance with the updates and cyberpunk was a shit show i think it was the beginning of the end because of the lazy dev team

[@king_kiff3969]

they had no choice, the blue hairs only know how to use UE5

[@Ambatukam69317]

f graphics just give me a good artstyle please, bo3 still looks up to date nowadays and runs like a dream idk why they all go for the bland photorealistic bs

[@madmantheepic7278]

Most normies (Fifa players) are creatively bankrupt, they’re also very stupid, why do you think they buy re-releases of Fifa games and the rebuy every pack of character cards? Because of the reasons above they are very easily impress, whose perception of art is “look real?” “Look good”

[@metallboy25]

Body Odor 3 ? 👀

[@shirotonbo6315]

​@@metallboy25 Black ops 3

[@ironbonk11]

yep that's why the walking dead saints and sinners and taletell walking dead games hold up

[@finkamain1621]

I play War Thunder which is UE and it's like 12 years old. Game still looks good and I have everything maxed out except for the tree distance, water reflections and texture super sampling which I'd need a better card for. A bunch of UE games are busted when they release and need to be optimized because the devs consist of random contractors that know UE and will go from studio to studio because everyone is switching/using UE

[@Attannno]

Wukong and sh2 were barely ever able to achieve 60fps on ps5 and those are linear games. I cant imagine how bad huge ue5 games will run.

[@dra6o0n]

They talk about the issues and even show you the data as they can reverse engineer the rendering pipeline for you to see what is lagging. It wastes a lot of power rendering shadows of trees when the fog obscures everything, and Lumen being active all the time when you can't see it, is a problem that they've been arguing on Epic's forum since 2022.

[@dra6o0n]

Epic is pandering to the woke corporations and governments.

[@dra6o0n]

A bunch of posts got deleted btw... Looks like UE5 being "weaponized" is something to do with their influence in the game industry.

[@user-eq2fp6jw4g]

@@dra6o0n This is very alarming. But nothing surprising as the video revealed the engine has taken allready route of being politically aligned. Hopefully this will be Unreal Engines and Epic's demise eventually

[@godkekliveshere431]

did everyone forget that PS5 it created by Sony the same company who gives us concord this year not everything its epic and UE5 fault omfg you right wing grifters and your SJW logic on game devs topics you don't care about

[@c1borgen]

I hate the "candy eye" era because it's also promotes the remakes/remasters trend. Instead of preserving the old charm of old graphics, devs try to appeal to the modern eyes. Also notice that old games are still incompatible with new consoles and no one does just re-release the old game, it always must be the "upgraded" one. PC, however, has enthusiasts that make patches and adapt old games for modern systems even for free.

[@stevekramerf242]

That's why fans can still play games like Oni, Red Faction 1, No One Lives Forever 1 and 2 or Heretic 2 on modern PC's.

[@stoneymahoney9106]

Consoles have the same problem that GaaS give PC players - they remove the opportunity for passionate fans to modernize, modify, improve and innovate on the games they love so much.

[@Billy-bc8pk]

It's not even eye candy -- Until Dawn remake both looks and runs worse than the original.

[@drencrum]

It’s only Sony that isn’t trying to make backwards compatibility a thing, you can still play the original versions of games on the Switch, Xbox Series and PC. PS5 is the problem.

[@ct2651]

Because they can sell back remaster or remake for 40 usd minimum and it would still sell more than if they do simple ports for 20 usd... remasters are right now selling as much as collection of old games when collection sell us back 4 to 10 games for 40...

[@byuwur]

In 2:15 you're mistaken: Those coding standards aren't for the games made in the engine but for the source code contributions for Unreal Engine or its Marketplace Plugins. Due to Unreal Engine being open source, many will use Unreal as a base and built their own custom tools on top with C++, and because of much of that code being in-house and propietary they won't push it to the original repository, they'll just keep it as their in house engile tools.

[@justindifabio482]

I looked everywhere but couldn't find this documentation.. I sure hope you're right, DEI is actively killing modern gaming and to have UE pushing it on publishers willing to use the engine is a terrible idea.

[@katharinekatharsis]

he doesnt care, he's obviously a grifter and plenty of people are willing to lap this sorta thing up.

[@Phil_529]

@@justindifabio482 It's really easy to find. Unreal Engine Coding Standard.

[@imjayyy.]

This is what happens when companies hire talentless hacks

[@godkekliveshere431]

don't you mean when companies are forced to band the knee to EDI

[@I-Dcompany]

I'm so god damn tired of people defending them like it's their job and livelihood. FUCK NO, you joined an industry of passion and art. You can't just half ass it for a paycheck

[@Jonderlei]

Its going to make the problem of so much of triple A seeming like generic copy pastes waaaay fucking worse.

CDPR literally has no choice as their DEI initiatives pushed out EVERYONE who knew Red Engine in depth. So development of RE was dead in the water. Overal it is obvious why UE and Unity are the most used engines and proprietary engines are dying. People that learn game dev learn on Unity and UE because those are openly available and free for them. When your company uses proprietary engine you need a lot of time, sometimes even a year to train your new employees in your in-house engine.

[@Billy-bc8pk]

Yup. And proprietary engines give you the benefit of making specific games with specific features. General purposes engines are great as learning tools and entry-level projects, but scale pretty horribly without massive refactors on the backend; but most studios do not want to spend several years refactoring an engine they don't own, much less, DEI hires are incapable of refactoring an engine for a large scale project because they have no idea how to code in native languages.

[@I-Dcompany]

Didn't know about this but just wanted to say Cyberpunk is legendary

@@Billy-bc8pk "specific features". Well Epic is sidestepping this problem. If you have a corporate lvl licensing deal with Epic you get your own engineers team at Epic to not only help you with tools that are already there, but also help you with or outright write some specific tools for you. For eg. CDPR said themselves that engineers at Epic are helping them 'translating' some specifics of Red Engine to UE5.

[@jase276]

@@I-Dcompany Yeah, Cyberpunk is legendary. A legend on how to make an awful game and to never follow its example.

[@I-Dcompany]

@@jase276 Even with it's launch issues it absolutely had a killer f ing story and was quite immersive

[@Dexter01992]

All it takes is the next John Riccitiello in UE5's management doing a riccitiello move, and the whole market would be screwed all at once.

[@jeanbethencourt1506]

Yeah possibly or it could be a good thing by forcing everyone to develop in-house tools or support smaller middleware developers.

[@todesziege]

@@jeanbethencourt1506 You don't turn the Titanic around on a dime.

[@jeanbethencourt1506]

@@todesziege can't rely on the Chinese communist party forever.

[@jeanbethencourt1506]

@@todesziege can't rely on the CCP for tech forever.

[@divisionic]

I hate UE5, not because it's a bad engine, but because whenever I see it, it's 95% something "ultra realistic" or something that will potentially run like ass. --Edit: To be more clear, the hate is directed at games which utilize the UE5 Engine, and don't know shit about optimization. So yeah, I get that there has been many cases of games that were pretty good and well optimized, Octopath Traveler in my mind, but I'm not looking forward to the games that will be released by those that simply don't know how to code, regardless of engines. (Cough, Yandere Simulator, cough cough)

[@akureshakni]

I hate it because it reminds me that the gaming industry we once had has now been overtaken by Greedy Corporations.

[@Anon_2_1]

So not true.... As a example, look up Wuthering Waves which runs on mobile.... or any other anime game made with unreal.

[@divisionic]

@@Anon_2_1 Fine, 95%, but my point still stands

[@Anon_2_1]

@@divisionic Nah the engine does not affect that much. You can run Unreal on phone or standalone VR if you want. And you can also have a lot of variety of different art styles thanks to the very good shader creation ability and it mostly just is about the models and textures.

[@Anon_2_1]

@@divisionic You just don't know what engine a game is using if you don't look it up so you think that it can only do realistic stuff

[@nichoudha]

If this is where AAA is going, then it was never good and deserves to completely collapse. It should all just fall and be left in the dustborn of history.

[@godkekliveshere431]

wukong made over 10k it was made in UE5 go play your dragon age vanguard then if you want your gate keeping keep exiting

[@MrTrueCaller619]

It is obvious why most gaming companies are using this engine, it's because their new incompetent employees can only work with it, most OG employees who are specialists in engineering are either fired or left . Rocksteady, Ubisoft, Bioware ... teams are completely changed .

[@Billy-bc8pk]

Sadly even Rockstar gutted almost ALL the OG devs who worked on GTA and Red Dead games over the last 20 years. I wouldn't be surprised if after GTA 6 they abandon the RAGE (even though it's still cutting edgein many ways and highly under-utilised for what it's capable of doing).

[@DaDoubleDee]

@@Billy-bc8pk probably quite a few retired by now as well

[@hardVatsuki]

@@Billy-bc8pk maybe this comment gonna age like milk but I am 100% sure rockstar will never switch to other engines, rage has euphoria system which is imo most advanced animations-ragdoll tech out there, not a single game managed to come close to it still

[@bricaaron3978]

@@hardVatsuki Yes, and GTAV didn't even make use of Euphoria. I can't say anything about RDR2 because I haven't tried it yet.

[@thesilverjedi8663]

I was fine with the unreal engine until every game started useing it and every game felt copy paste but different name

[@trashboatex]

It's funny because that's simply not true, but okay.

[@metallboy25]

Yeah, totally. Thats why Wukong looks exactly like Kingdom Hearts IV.

[@PALADINKILLIAN-1403]

@@trashboatex not really but okay kiddo (:

[@El_Pickle7]

Hows it not true? Youre argument needs substance​@@trashboatex

[@trashboatex]

@El_Pickle7 Okay. It's not true because unreal engine is blank when you open it. The engine is extremely versatile in how you're able to pretty much create things from scratch. You're even able to explore the source code and program entirely new features into it. The notion most people are spinning about "Every Unreal Engine game looking the same" has nothing to do with the engine and more to deal with the art direction of said games. Unreal excels at PBR(Physically Based Rendering), which aims to create photorealism because unreal is good at PBR, and out of the box, the settings are geared for this as well as assets such as quixel megascans, and metahuman it's extremely easy to get a project running as well as producing them faster. Unreal is capable of much more than PBR. We call this NPR(non photorealism). Some games can have distinct styles using a combination of NPR and PBR, and you'll usually see that NPR looks more distinct than PBR styles, i daresay. This is truly where art direction shines. The common misconception i tend to see is "Unreal engine 4 looked way better than 5" as if unreal engine 5 was a complete rewrite of the engine, it's not and just a rebrand of ue4. It's important to know this because you're able to turn some of these newer features that 5 added and use older methods of optimization and setting tuning, eliminating the "copy and paste look" and that's why Art Direction, Asset creation, Concept art, and much more are important to the creation of making a game, and sadly are overlooked in the game development pipeline apparently, because games haven't been about art lately, and more about capitalistic pump and pump, it's easier to ship a realistic game than a game with a unique style, but like I've said this is a developer problem not an unreal problem, because unreal can do it all, just like unity, Godot, and more. Choose whatever tool you like the most.

[@dominokos]

I can say with 100% certainty as a software engineer, that none of these devs truly want to switch from their proprietary engines to UE5, but their managers are bombarded by buzz-words and presentations on conferences about the "hot new thing" and it's these technologically illiterate people that blindly trust promotional material and force their development teams to completely overhaul their working environments, so they can say in their yearly reports that "this year they've managed to holistically update their development processes to follow the most cutting-edge industry standards". Sadly, none of the stakeholders ask "But is the game good tho?"

[@DropletPlant]

WRONG STOP LYING

[@mando5279]

@@DropletPlant He is right

[@GameBoyyearsago]

​@@DropletPlantshutup gayreal engine fanboy

[@cadmanfox]

@@GameBoyyearsago I have been using Unreal for a long time, and it is unfortunate to see it actually turning gay.. You hate to see it

[@MartinDlabaja]

You seems not to really understand how it works. Unreal is open code, you can code anything you want in it, its not restricting devs.

[@Varangian_af_Scaniae]

You shop everything on Amazon right?!? This whole video is about monopoly ruins!!!

[@HellPedre]

ofc they dont, its such an easy, ignorant scape goat tactic to criticize the industry just blaming a tool... it really shows the ignorance, ppl are clueless man

[@DonVigaDeFierro]

One day, they will pull a Unity, but there would be no backlash because there won't be any alternative... Remember: Disney invested 1.5 BILLION into Epic Games...

[@leoncca]

Engines aren't directly responsible for "good graphics", so to speak. They provide tools to streamline some tasks, and some of those tools do end up helping, in some cases, to improve graphical fidelity, but going from UE4 to UE5 isn't really gonna change that much. Art style is still the #1 one to make a game look good. I really wish it were that easy to up graphical fidelity, graphics programming would be so much easier lol.

[@trashboatex]

Exactly!

[@acamacho]

Say it louder. Unique art styles can still be made and it's up to the developers to put in the work to try, proprietary or not.

[@ping_th]

I agree

[@reecesx]

Your imaginary concept of an "art style" doesn't turn itself into a set of offline and online graphic pipelines. What omega cope is this? Let me guess, you think modifying some shader template and adjusting a hue in some texture layer suddenly makes a title feel like it has a unique art direction. B-b-but they're just tools. yea, no, it's a fortnite the open world heightmap generator featuring a part of wreck it ralphs brdf, good luck finding anybody doing anything original with it, and good luck finding any modern title using this engine that doesnt immediately fall apart in the exact same way as the rest. inb4 " source: my friend whose "making a game" by stitching together blueprints told me. trust me bro. we're doing something original. "

[@trashboatex]

@reecesx Indies are capable of doing it, so yes, an art style exists. m.kzbin.info/www/bejne/nJnRn5dtjs-jsNE

[@Outrack]

This is like complaining that Photoshop is ruining digital art. The observation at 1:38 is especially bizarre, do you think enemy patterns can't be replicated in other engines or something? The more I listen, the more apparent it is that you have very little idea of how any of this works.

[@Intamin]

You're missing the subtlety, here. All engines have limitations, and games that have studio-built engines are inherently tailored for the games those studios are developing. A developer can make any number of workarounds happen on UE5, but with limited time and budget, the higher-ups are going to nix many attempts at customization just to get the game out, and everything is going to pool into one look and feel. It's already happened.

[@mikeluna2026]

Not really, there are systems, mechanics or effects, etc, easier to reproduce in one engine but not in another (and even if you do reproduce it performance isn't always the same). His point that if the engine isn't made to support something it will mean that extra work needs to be put to emulate it is very real. You would know if you've used more than one engine like Godot, Unity, Unreal, Flax, Stride, etc, etc. Each has its pros and cons. Plus, the expected workflow in one engine can also create limitations/roadblocks if you were previously working on an engine with a completely different workflow (especially true when you are porting your existing game from one engine to another)...

[@Outrack]

@@Intamin I'm not missing anything. Sure, there are developers using UE's out-of-box solutions without much alteration and it does end up making games look visually similar, but blaming Unreal is just silly as it's clearly the fault of lazy developers skipping steps in production. You even admit that it comes down to "higher-ups", so what's the actual issue here? Remove UE and they'll cut corners somewhere else as it's a philosophy issue, not software. Either way, consumers will eventually struggle to differentiate products and this will naturally solve itself - and without shifting away from UE, because aesthetic adjustments are actually fairly easy.

[@Outrack]

@@mikeluna2026 Nonsense, and I do actually know as I have years of experience in many of those you've listed. What you're describing is only an issue at a ground level.

[@XPol555]

i'm currently working on a videogame, using unreal engine 5. I completely agree with you. It's nor Epic or UE fault of all of this; there are drastical decisions that has been made... but the art is always made by people! Not (yet) by just the bare tools...

[@sonnyankau9239]

game devs watch videos like this and laugh. it's a wonderful example of how gamers have no clue at all what they are talking about.

[@dougburton9591]

Bruh...this is just all wrong information, also stuff that has nothing to do with Unreal Engine. This is like saying pencils are ruining writing. All the individual points are wrong too.

[@AugerHybrid]

As some one said on internet: gamers want shorter games with worse graphics.

[@d-turn3314]

These same people will then complain and say "why does this new game only have a 6 hour runtime and worse graphics than the older game in 2015".

[@Dave_Parrott]

I had no idea about the censorship requirements. That is horrifying. I had my problems with UE5 before; namely the same-y looking lighting and fuzzy bloom effects just rubbing me the wrong way for whatever reason. But just knowing that they DISALLOW COMMON ENGLISH is going to haunt my thoughts for a long time. This is spookier than anything Halloween-related I saw all October.

[@trashboatex]

That's not a UE5 problem that's an art direction problem and probably the use of Lumen and Megascans.

[@AFCMS]

It's wrong, and many anti-woke influencers and persons who aren't developers make the same mistake. The "inclusion" policy doesn't apply to games, it applies to code you want to contribute back to Unreal and Epic Games. A LOT of projects have this kind of policy actually, including much more important ones like the Linux kernel. This kind of policy sucks, but it doesn't apply to things you make with it and isn't nearly as bad as game censorship.

[@Billy-bc8pk]

@@AFCMS That doesn't make it wrong, nor better. Anyone who needs to do refactors are going to hav ea SERIOUS problem because of those policies, meaning anyone who wants to refactor UE5's multithreading to remove microstuttering, or alter the graphics renderer for their own rendering pipeline (like what Arc System Works did for their fighting games), or those who want to rewrite and refactor AI logic for their own behaviour (like GSC and their STALKER games) will have to rewrite the backend and THAT will cause problems when you cannot use common use english. And yes, it is as bad as game censorship because it completely adds unnecessary complications to anyone who actually wants to IMPROVE the engine to optimise their game.

[@annekristiina7503]

This was new to me too. Time to opt out of as much as one can from this tyranny.

[@Akrob55555]

@@AFCMS Thank you for correcting all this misinformation going on. People are insane. These are just coding standards that apply to the Unreal Engine codebase itself, not games made in the engine.

[@AndreGouvea]

About the censorship (or not): The section above says "When you work in the Unreal Engine codebase, we encourage you to strive to use respectful, inclusive, and professional language.", they are talking about THEIR CODEBASE... There's no censorship in the code that YOU going to create using the engine (actually there's no way for them to even control this), so stop BS to get some clicks.

[@dreadmoc12]

Unreal Engine is not ruining gaming. Game developers are ruining gaming.

[@topy706]

game developers are tought with unreal

[@divinecomedian2]

Consumers are ruining gaming too. It's really all of the above.

[@unseen_stream]

@@topy706 UE is quite flexible as an engine. Blame bad game designers and consumers instead.

[@csesznaktom]

Publishers, CEOs, art directors, producers, etc ruins the gaming not the small developer who just try to finish anything in time with the code. What do you think this type of work is happening? Developer sit down push some button and bumm 3D model and art and game? Thats not how any of it works!

[@tropixx_xlr1549]

​@@divinecomedian2 Facts a hundred percent

[@sir_christmas_leopold_duckson]

UE5 is just a drop in the bucket for me. There's also the lack of creativity, poor writing, agenda pushing, DEI, live service games, required internet connection for single player games, digital distribution, devs calling us toxic, bigoted, misogynistic, etc.

[@amandaholland8928]

Hi, I'm a game designer with about a decade of experience. I've worked in Unity, UE5, and a couple proprietary engines. Some of the concerns of the video I believe as misguided/blaming the wrong thing. The issue isn't UE5 for the majority of the concerns regarding "developers/designers becoming lazy". To put this into perspective, it's like saying the issue with mechanics nowadays is they don't use a handwrench anymore, they use a torque wrench. Yes, just like a mechanic a torque wrench can ruin products if you're not using the tool correctly. Did you know that UE5 is also used for movies, game cinematics, etc... UE5's "graphics" being good is a myth, it's easier to make the graphics look better with proper lighting- and UE5's lighting is phenomenal. I do agree that companies are focusing too much on graphics and not about the core mechanics of the game. But that's not the engine's fault. Anything any other engine can do- so can unreal... it just needs to be added via a designer that has vision. TL:DR is don't blame UE5 for corporate idiocy. The only concern in this video that holds weight is censorship of TITLES in their marketplace. (I've never even heard of this till today, so it's not very relevant, but it's a dangerous road they're starting on with censorship.)

[@Tuco3095]

Finally someone speaking my mind. These youtubers talk without any knowledge spreading false information lol. He talks about games being generic, while recently wukong broke records

[@Navhkrin]

@@Tuco3095 This is what happens when anyone can make supposedly "informative" videos that just contain bullshit for the most part. Internet used to be a place of information, now it is filled with junk of random arguments thrown out to gain attention

[@joshua42777]

As a solo dev it saves me a lot of time on graphics, and I do know how to use the post process stack. In the past I spent days Trying to get unity to look like unreal.

[@ivibs1984]

I really like Valheim and Shadows of Doubt. Both run on Unity...... both really stutter.

[@jrconway3]

That's the thing. Its great for independent and solo developers. But all the big name companies using the sane engine is a huge problem...

[@richardPhilips2]

Well as a solo Dev no one expect you to create your own graphics engine , but AAA could

[@OnyeNacho]

@@jrconway3 It is not great for anyone, least of all indies and solo devs. Since the third installment, Unreal Engine was always designed for AAA devs as their primary customers. It was never truly indie-friendly like Epic pretends it is. They had to make concessions to make it work for indie use. Even then, the 5th installment is a unreliable, bloated mess that is difficult to optimize and likely will require you download the source code or work some depackaging magic to attempt a proper optimization of your product.

[@XeenimChoorch-nx8wx]

You compute the physics then render pixels … what is the problem? Not nearly as difficult as centering a div

[@rogerwinright2290]

I am an unreal engine developer by trade. The problem with the combat system in Unreal Engine is that everyone trusts and tweaks the built in stuff instead of building anything new with it. As for the AI, the behavior tree system is incredibly well built and can be used for some extremely good AI but I wouldn't doubt that hardly anybody uses it in that capacity.

[@HenrichAchberger]

thats weird, I think their behaviour tree is utter trash and pain to work with. building my own behaviour trees instead of their was so much easier with so much better results

[@I-Dcompany]

Any comments on the other engines? Such as Unity?

[@HenrichAchberger]

@@I-Dcompany if I used unity my game would be way way worse

[@I-Dcompany]

@@HenrichAchberger Hey Slender became a cult legend from that engine

[@I-Dcompany]

@@HenrichAchberger Which is still not playable on Xbox smh

[@DEEPANSHUGulia88]

This is what I have noticed- a lot of games in unreal engine during recent times, take lots of computer resources when they are not even graphically impressive, I have tried many isometric games. And they run very badly on my system ex- soulstice, weird west etc, These games are not even that much impressive. I struggled to get 30 fps on them on 720 medium. But I can play tomb raider 2013, rise of tomb raider, gta v, batman arkham games, titanfall 2, tales of berseria, etc all at 1080p medium with 60 fps. This confuses me so much.

[@trashboatex]

Every unreal engine 5 project defaults settings consist of Lumen and / or Nanite. Lumen is real-time global illumination it essentially lets you edit lighting in real time. The thing about Lumen is that it's resource hungry and can reduce your frames significantly. Many indie games and individuals use this because EPic games and many others swear that it's a tool that's an absolute game changer when it's not really at least not yet. So this one setting and maybe another one like nanite may be the reason you are lagging a lot. But who really knows? I don't know how these people made their games.

[@cepheus3d]

@@trashboatex Honestly it's a thing I really hate about the industry right now. It doesn't take a genius to look up settings to disable things like Nanite and Lumen and UE5 performs great. When you turn them off and see significant performance gains, why not develop a game without them? Honestly looking at the Steam Hardware Survey, people run what... a 4060 these days? I have a hard time running Lumen on my professional machine, let alone someone with a budget setup lol. I really wish we'd go back to using baked lighting solutions and less temporal slop.

[@trashboatex]

@cepheus3d I fully agree that these new technologies aren't for making games. They're for making tech demos, I fully believe you don't need them to make a quality game.

[@Intamin]

@@trashboatex Nobody is talking about Lumen, it's insane. It also makes everything shimmer with a flickering, undulating spray paint shine.

[@ping_th]

As an Unreal engine beginner developer (100+ hour of developing childish looking game). Unreal has problem of FPS and File size that need some technical skill to fix and some indie don’t know how to fix because it’s quite hard to disable those feature

[@polyhawk]

On an individual level, Unreal Engine lowers the skill threshold to allow people that aren't necessarily game developers to be able to actually make games. A lot like how 3D software has evolved over time to become easier to use, making it easier for people to learn 3D artistry. I think in the world of art, your output and style shouldn't be limited by a skillshelf, but instead how passionate you are about creating it.

[@MarioCola]

Corporate greed is damaging game development, not unreal 5 that's just stupid and a way to get some more attention

[@Intamin]

Lumen is what has mostly ruined UE5. The blurry, nasty reflections on all surfaces with zero crispness has made everything look like a mess, and no developer seems to be able to curtail it because it's just *how* Lumen works. No one is talking about Lumen, it's appalling.

[@thelaw3536]

Its good for prototyping.

[@Klayperson]

Moving to UE5 means absolutely nothing. Games have been transforming into slop regardless of engine, and that's thanks to greed and "modern" culture. The percentage of genuinely creative game directors is not going to go down due to studios using Unreal, nor will it go up. As always, we will just have to vet our purchases and vote with our dollars, as it always has been.

[@NeedSomeNuance]

No one, and i mean NO ONE, will tell you that their favorite thing about their favorite game, was the graphics

[@joseph.cotter]

A couple points. The base code is all available for modification by the game studio, so that they can get in and replace any areas of the code that doesn't suite their vision without having to create an entire engine from scratch. This _allows_ for a potentially highly modified game play from the base engine with a fraction of the effort of maintaining a whole engine. Second, having people with a base skill set for developing in an engine *cannot* be overstated. As someone who's career and company was as a corporate trainer I can tell you that the #1 cost in changing software was retraining costs. Certain things really do benefit from some level of standardization to allow people to focus their attentions on artistic aspects rather than wrangling learning an engine. * This is not to discount most of what you have said as you have made some really good points. There are always tradeoffs.... But, there is a reason people building their computers moved away from writing their own operating software and moved to pre-made OS's like Microsoft and Linux. This is just the next level of that. I have for a long time argued that game engines are actually at this point, approaching being simply the next level of an OS, like GUI's were over text based interfaces. It was when there was a move towards GUI's on all client level machines became the default that things got rarefied down to Windows, Apple and Unix/Linux. All of the other graphic OS's lasted for a brief moment and died. We are now at a point where a 3D layer on the OS will be common and as such we are seeing the same consolidation. Oh, and Linux is also highly modifiable but the majority went towards the pretty much standardized Windows and Apple OS, so yea... there is that, re: the 'laziness' comments you made are not unfounded. Although not sure if it is laziness or shift in targeting resources... Personally I would side with 'some of both.'

[@Hilislaw]

Games used to be forms of art. Games today: bland chunks of woke dei corporate garbage. The AAA industry can't die fast enough.

[@DreamyAileen]

2:13 This is misinformation. These are from Epic's coding standard, which is a very long document detailing best-practice code formatting guidelines for internal consistency and readability. *_They are not rules for users._* Unless you work at Epic, or intend to intend to submit code to Epic (e.g. for Unreal Marketplace), you are not obligated to follow them in the slightest.

[@cobaltfog]

They're just stupid and show the internal mindset at Epic.

[@DreamyAileen]

​@@cobaltfog Yeah they're stupid, but NovemberHotel talks about them like they're rules that Epic forces every Unreal user to follow and that's just not true.

[@NickyGee-f8y]

I dont like how unreal engine feels, idk why

[@luluskuy]

Feels like tech demos that shouldn't be used now

[@killer8217gaming]

Its not unreal engine ruining games. Its devs not optimizing them. in most cases its not Unreal's fault

[@I-Dcompany]

The only Unreal I remember is tournament

[@cadmanfox]

Well.. UE does inherently have a lot of problems, specifically with nanite and "optimization."

[@_PathOfExile]

Cheaper , Faster, Reality grade graphics = Cheap game that players can afford.

[@Varil92]

Nowadays developers can't even bother to create their own proprietary engine. 20 years ago almost any studios had their own engine and every game felt different and somehow experimental. Nowadays game developers are just modders who use Unreal Engine and everything is bland, similar and in the worst case poorly optimized.

[@antongrant8827]

If it was up to the developers, I suspect, that most of us would love to do that. But sadly, it is extremely hard to explain why writing your own tech would be beneficial, because very often developers and their management care about different things: while the developer, if passionate enough, would mostly care about things like performance, engine core tech quality, development tools, etc. management mostly cares about deadlines, profits and just generally how to do more with less. Just to be clear: writing your own tech IS, most likely, beneficial, because not only it allows you to tweak it to match your exact needs, it also opens a door for greater optimization options, reduces the bloatness of the code, and most importantly distinguishes your game among others. For now, the industry is mostly switching to unreal, but I hope that will change with time. At least, a lot of gamers are not happy with the way we are going rn)

[@KingKrouch]

Everything using the engine looks the same because the engine makes custom shading (for example, toon shading) a complete pain in the ass to implement, it's a pain to have official modding support (you can't distribute modding tools to anyone that isn't a UE licensee and their own UGC plugins don't work anymore), rather than adding C# they're adding Verse (their own scripting language that has terrible syntax), controller support in the engine still sucks on PC, most developers aren't taking advantage of Unreal's scalability settings or performance profiling tools. I used to use UE4, but I got tired of waiting for Epic to fix glaring engine issues. Despite Unity's problems and Godot's problems, at least those don't actively get in the way when I want custom shaders or to extend the engine's functionality.

[@OnyeNacho]

Plus at least Godot is entirely open-source and can be used against the creators when necessary (ie. now). Unreal Engine is a bloated yet visually attractive trap. Nothing more.

[@LuaanTi]

Forget about controller support on the PC, they can't get the _keyboard_ working right! UE5 games essentially require you to switch to a US keyboard layout to play. Sure, you can manually remap all the keys to get them to where they're supposed to be, but not only is that a lot of stupid work you shouldn't be doing, the UX still sucks as all those key hints are now completely ineligible (e.g. say goodbye to 1, 2 and 3 for inventory slots, and hello to "___@@" and "caretaefd" and such).

[@Makoto03]

I like variety in gaming, so I don't want every game using the same engine. I like that alot of Japanese rpgs use their own engines and have unique art styles. Even if it may seem janky gameplay wise sometimes.

[@trashboatex]

You need to understand that an engine is just a development environment, where you add your own assets and functionality into. It really doesn't matter which one you use its a pick your poison type of situation, what truly matters is what direction you choose to take your art which actually doesn't have anything to do with unreal at all it has to deal with what models you're using, are they low poly, or high will you hand draw your textures, or procedurally create them, is it stylized(NPR) or Photorealism(PBR) this will define whether or not your game looks unique or not it's always been art direction.

[@I-Dcompany]

Japan actually gives a damn. That's why Nintendo is so successful

[@DropletPlant]

ACTUALY YOU ARE silghtly incorect.From past 5-6 years MANY started using unity,some unreal and some godot or some custom made engines wich have godot or other engine as their base/bedrock. So its not as you think it is.There are also some in house engines that some japanese studios made that are actualy called different,are modified diffentry,have different tools and ways of using tools BUT if STRIPPED DOWN could see that the BASE/CORE of the engine is basicaly unity,unreal,godot,cry,..engine core or certain features basicaly took/inspired from other engines and refactored in a way to be functional in their own custom engine. LONG GONE are the times where custom engine/in house engine is fully in house bcs nowadays or past 10 or so years MANY in house engines,its core/base are litteraly just stripped down version or feactored version of some other engine that alredy is on the market just additionaly tweeked,changed,adapted.

[@FlamespeedyAMV]

Any AAA game using this engine i just avoid, tbh im avoiding all AAA games

[@Nomadmandude]

videogames are shit now and im getting too old to even care anymore... im going to make a garden... screw this.

[@randomcommenter10_]

just play Indie and AA games because that's where the soul is at, even Inide/AA games made in Unreal can be really good as I know of many

[@gorillagroddgaming]

Even indie games are trash now. Most are soulslike slop, roguelike slop, metroidvania slop etc. Also they almost always have some political messaging in them too.

[@DogeickBateman]

@@gorillagroddgamingI play games like door kickers now, those are far better and indie too.

[@stevekramerf242]

@@DogeickBateman One of the few pearls in a sea of crap.

[@rift1067]

One aspect in gamedev UE5 is improving/streamlining significantly is the animation pipeline. They are implementing ways in which you can create variety in your animations through increasingly complex control rig features. But the problem remains the same as with other facets of UE5: they're being utilized on a surface level. UE5 as an engine is FASCINATING - it's just that nobody's taking the risk to push the engine to its absolute limit.

[@HappyChap8]

Devs don't actually know how to read / write code anymore. Unreal is popular because it requires almost zero technical knowledge to use.

[@slowtrip8011]

I appreciate the ones who do, but honestly if development doesn't get easier whats the point of progress. You know what I mean?

[@_its.just.regi_]

Sounds like this is a people/studio issue, not the engine, no?

[@jfht318]

Unreal engine is not bad , its the triple AAA studio C suits that push unrealistic deadlines on devs and have no understanding or love behind the games they make . Most of these companies were making horrid games with their inhouse engine as well. Unreal is amazing for indie devs as it speeds up workflows for graphics , HOWEVER , good harmonious graphics still takes alot of crafting to achieve and depends on the game you want to make. Unreal also provides the source for their engine so you can modify it as you like.

[@CharlieIsDigital]

I completely agree. A lot of people were ragging on Bethesda, saying Starfield sucked because of their outdated engine and they should move to Unreal already. This isn't the problem, though. If it was, we also wouldn't like their older games that were made on more primitive versions of it. They failed with Starfield because they didn't play to their creative strengths or their engine's strengths. This obsession with graphics will hopefully taper out over the next decade or so as we see continually diminishing returns on trying to make things as photorealistic as possible. They're going to have to start making interesting gameplay and AI instead or everything will just feel like the same, bland formula.

[@NicholasBrakespear]

All very true... but it still hast to be said, their engine was always awful, and every older game Bethesda churned out would have actually been better on a different engine. Even Morrowind. In fact, their engine got worse. As a modder, I couldn't help but notice that more and more things were hardcoded over time, and more awkward to change. And good grief, the dialogue/quest system... to this day, as both a modder and an indie developer, I have NEVER seen a dialogue system so awful. Tying important quest variables and dialogue checks - right down to "whose line this is" - to case-sensitive strings? It's a wonder any of the quests worked at all.

[@ledzep1023]

@@NicholasBrakespearnot to mention that the PC ports of most Bethesda games are super unoptimized and bugs/crashes will happen frequently. Even Fallout 4 has cloud syncing and crashes. I wish Bethesda would make a new engine from scratch, they desperately need it if they wanna make functional games

[@Billy-bc8pk]

@@NicholasBrakespear This is where engine refactoring should have been done -- they could have spent three to five years converting to a 64-bit floating point precision platform for large world coordinates and buffered streaming to do away with chunk-based load screens, but they obviously decided to go the quick and dirty route instead of putting in the time to upgrade the Creation Engine to be competitive. Wouldn't be surprised if they make a silly announcement saying they have switched to UE5 for The Elder Scrolls 6, which will get a bunch of normies cheering and clapping, only for it to come out even jankier and even less optimised than previous Bethesda outings.

[@Damian-cilr2]

Billy if it switches to ue5 it will be unoptimized as all hell 100% and it will suck (its fucking bethesda,their latest "rpg" is barely an rpg) (sorry using a custom youtube frontend,doesn't have @ing people properly yet atleast)

[@johnleorid]

At 7:20 when the firelink shrine music plays, I kinda got pulled out because of it. In Dark Souls, you don't listen to high tech talks, you just are and you try to continue to be, not more, not less.

[@Suleyk95]

For real, I was listening to this trying to fall asleep, was very close, and the music made me snap back to reality hahahaha

[@KiranKumar-uv6kd]

Unreal engine is amazing and making games better rather then ruining them

[@nikkeydc]

When will the WOKENESS and REALISM in gaming end????

[@todesziege]

Games don't exist in isolation. The same ideas has shaped movies for even longer.

[@trashboatex]

Make your own game without any of them

[@NicholasAdamDemonte]

@@trashboatex “if you don’t like it, make your own!” Sorry, clown, most of us here are not game developers and you’re allowed to be critical of games without creating your own.

[@justinp9170]

I really wish iD Tech 5 (or whatever version it is today) would find its way into more games. I like the Unreal Engine and it's a technical marvel that Epic Games put a lot of effort into making, but I also don't like the monopoly it's giving Epic Games. And telling devs what they can and cannot make in it with a threat to take licensing... that's a HUGE RED FLAG. Anybody who is old enough to remember... the unreal engine and id tech engine used to go back and forth on graphical quality but Unreal ended up winning in the end. I believe we need to get something like that back. Another game engine that can be competitive and can keep Epic Games in check. DOOM ETERNAL in my opinion is a technical marvel that outmatches most games made in Unreal Engine. Both in graphical quality and optimizations. If I was Microsoft I'd look into throwing resources into the iD Tech engine and expanding its toolset with more functionality and enhancing developmental experience. They could even pull a Star Citizen and change it so much that it becomes its own engine.

[@CoryMillard]

Doom eternal uses id tech 7. The dark ages uses id tech 8. I agree with ya maybe licensing issues idk.

[@thegodofalldragons]

They recently released a pretty extensive modding toolset for Doom Eternal. The level of customization it offered made me wonder if they were toying with the idea of throwing their hat back in the ring, engine-wise.

[@DaDoubleDee]

The marketing by Epic Games was phenomenal, they really sold UE5 with their tech demos and every gamer/vfx artist collectively creamed their pants. Funny how almost everything they showed in their tech demos has either been done before or hasn't been used yet in a game

[@CoryMillard]

@@thegodofalldragons No I don't think so. I use id studio to make maps for doom eternal. You can mod the game with it. Id software is my favorite but I admit their engine is good mostly for fps games. Where ue5 you can make different kinds of games and SFX.

[@DropletPlant]

So magicaly it is fine when unity had 90-95-97% of the market dominance and now magicaly,coincidently when epic/UE finaly broke hat and got to 45-50-55% OF MARKET FINALY AFTER DECADES OF UNITY DOMINANCE NOW is magicaly bad BUT no one bat an eye when Unity was dominating left and right and STILL IS DOMINATING IN SEVERL SPHERES UNITY STILL HAS 60-70-80% market especilay in mobile sector where still UE AND OTHERS DIDNT MAKE MA HUGE DENT IN UNITYS MOMNOPOLY.

[@xXSilentAgent47Xx]

It's crazy how gen z and a gamers ruined the games. They care more about graphics and everyday grinding than quantity. Why even play game for graphics when we have awful storyline and lack of fun stuffs and more side activities? Why are collectibles considered to be "fun"? They never were fun and never will be. That's a fact. Lack of creativity on story and game offerings is big issue. GTA SA had so much in game that devs wanted to give more if their time was extended. Probably would've been far better than GTA 5. There are boring side stuffs like Valet and Trucking but that's what made game impressive. Being new to experience the quantity. Saints Row 2 had so much than SR TT yet the sequels didn't offer any of what 2nd game did. Game was fun and had new stuffs, but previous stuffs like Septic Truck, Fuzz and Trail Blazing felt better (Trail Blazing has in TT and had improved driving mechanic, but didn't offer much more fun. Felt bland and downgraded, you're just driving around instead of hitting the explosion barrels and have multiple explosions).

[@I-Dcompany]

My dumbshit generation has ruined even more than gaming. I'm technically gen z but I'm a traitor to these disgusting people

[@I-Dcompany]

Also SA was my very 1st game at the age of 4

[@Lucrei.]

Given that 3D platformers (the kings of the 90s) are one of my favourite genres, I'm going to take offense to that and say that collectables can be fun, they just need to be in well designed games where they are the reward for clearing good level design This also applies to things like classic Zelda, Metroidvanias etc.

[@EntrepreneurialBoost]

The only developer I've seen unreal engine to its highest potential is the Gears of War devloper, if you have played Gears 5, you'll actually know how realistic, stunning that game was and gameplay is amazing as well, that with ue 4 look and play far better than any ue 5 games I've ever seen. So it's upto the developer, if they try and have really passions, they can pull off a great game with any engine.

[@Mostima115]

The problem is: the high ups in all those company's who only care about money, don't see a creative masterpiece or a good story or fun gameplay = all they see in our beloved games is graphics... that's why you always heard talks about graphics in the last 10+ years in Dev talks, presentations and so on.

[@godkekliveshere431]

don't you mean the EDI its not the company is the EDI wukong was made in UE5 and it has plenty of creativity - no EDI made 10k in the bank western concored and dustborn they have plenty of EDI = fail

[@SomeCanine]

The main reason they are all using UE5 is because they no longer have the staff who can use and modify their internal engines. That plus they outsource a lot of things. They get a lot of college grads who come into their company and have no idea what they are doing because the internal engine is so much different than anything they learned in school. So they have to spend a year training every new hire before they are productive.

[@Light_Mode227]

While I agree that there are some aspects about unreal engine that may be having negative impacts, I believe a larger problem is the actual developers getting lazy due to the tools they have available. If developers were actually passionate about what they do and wanted to create high quality games then unreal engine would not be the problem.

As someone with six years or so in Unreal, I don’t think this is true, it’s too broad a statement. There are pre-made plugins to precompile shaders for example, but people just don’t use them. Lunen GI looks great but you need to tweak settings. You can do anything you want from flat 2D to Alan Wake path tracing. It’s down to developers.

[@MostlyPennyCat]

It's all a function of cost, man hours. Creating a custom art style, look, shaders and ultimately UE customisations is _expensive_ That's what's happening, not some mythical "UE Look" But to non-developers, this is what it looks like at the most superficial level.

@@MostlyPennyCat The ray trace thing is tough too, cos it does look great when done just right, but currently has to rule out the static pipeline. The future looks better though, as the roadmap for Lumen ray-traced GI includes using the UE5 path tracer for fast baked lighting, allowing us to combine the best of both. For now though, it's either or, and the flexibility of Ray Tracing from art perspective is very tempting...

[@capoeragames2081]

Not just unreal engine, you nailed the "more poly count, more sample counts, bigger map, more more more!!" that's the problem with today's games, they focus on bigger, when less is more, we've achieved so much in the past when it came to graphic, we didn't need ray tracing, upscallers and frame generation for NFS 2015 to run above 120 fps, they achieved cheap photorealism with great techniques and creativity, utilizing the best of their abilities to overcome the limitations of that era and now all we see are games using some kind of lumen, nanite + frame generation + upscaler and glueing with spit and hoping it sticks.

[@SquirrelMaster69]

Hiring activist devs created a lazy atmosphere. 🐿️

[@someonesvagabond]

Blaming UE5 is like that saying goes: "A master blames himself, a fool blames his tools."

[@OnigoroshiZero]

Such a bad take. The engine has nothing to do with the current state of the gaming industry, and UE5 is by far the best engine in almost every aspect.

[@HybOj]

2:30 well this is a big issue, if the woke is implemented at the engine level. I dont mean it as a joke, this is actually insane :X So Its not just Stutter Engine 5 but Woke Stutter Engine 5. Pfff

[@Nordanway]

Dont you forget how TAA is present in every UE5 Game. Everything becomes a blurry mess

[@IMNOTLEAVING]

the gaming industry doesn't have a engine problem it has a greed and talent problem.

[@ikagura]

I am a bit bored of seeing the same visual effects from that engine.

[@trashboatex]

You mean you're sick of developers not having art direction. Because last time I checked, unreal is blank. When you open it, you have to create assets and visual fidelity yourself.

[@Irrelavant__]

that's on developers not on the engine. UE is versatile and can do stylized and realistic visuals very well (go on artstation and look it up). If the devs are incompetent or directionless then you get your generic looking slop just to make quick buck.

[@laius6047]

You guys act af if theres no good games just because our favourite companies degenerated into oblivion. No company can last forever (because people in that company change). So just move onto something else. There no need to worship a brand or a company.

[@divinecomedian2]

We can bemoan the loss of great franchises

[@laius6047]

@@divinecomedian2 there's only that much that a franchise can be milked

[@lucaschudleigh7193]

Gamers: “We want better writing, story and to keep woke ideologies out of our games”. AAA Developers: “Absolutely, we’re going to switch over to UE5, which will solve all these graphical complaints that you have”.

[@alexanderarieatas8230]

AAA Devs will make things worse and not forfill these promises. They will then become AAAA Developers.

[@I-Dcompany]

I keep going back to Arby n the Chief whenever I hear anything about Graphics

[@SynthwavelLover]

Here's a shocker for you- Games have been political, have pushed ideologies on you, for decades now! Plenty of good, financially successful, games have "woke ideologies" (AKA you can pick pronouns and there are non-white non-male characters) including Final Fantasy 7, God of War, Spiderman 2, Half-Life 2, and plus there are many many successful indie titles that are even MORE "woke" than most AAA titles. You Anti-Wokeists over-react more than the SJWs you claim to despise. "Uh oh I can choose my pronouns on the character select screen so that makes the game bad!" This is the equivalent to if an SJW didn't play a game because a white male was the protagonist. Get a grip.

[@Crouton_6]

While none of this that you talked about is true for unreal engine, rather it’s true for godot. Idk what Unreal did to anger anyone and I use it every single day

[@Billy-bc8pk]

Just to note: Frostbite was no more adequate for an action-RPG than UE3 was. The difference was that the original BioWare Austin studio refactored the Unreal Engine to work for Mass Effect 1 because they cut a TON of corners and streamlined some of the engine's drawbacks to work to their benefit using artistic flair and workarounds to get Mass Effect to perform like an engrossing action-RPG. BioWare Montreal did not have the engineers on-hand or talent to refactor the Frostbite to do what BioWare Austin managed to do with UE3. It wasn't an engine problem, it was an engineering problem. That ties into the problems we're seeing now where a bunch of studios are forfeiting their proprietary middleware to opt for UE5 because it's cheap and they don't need to pay world-class engineers to refactor it when they can just pull whatever they need from the plugins or asset store.

[@sventomasek]

I used to love Unreal Engine and was excited for lumen and nanite, but now it's just being used to skip development time and have realistic graphics out of the box. CDPR switching to UE made sense to me when they announced it, as they said Cyberpunk was hard to develop because as they were developing it they had to wait for missing engine features to be developed, but now the engine has come so far that the game runs incredibly well on a 1070 while still looking amazing, and I doubt they'll recreate that in UE.

[@Billy-bc8pk]

Yes, the Red Engine is the most optimised open-world engine -- and the only engine to run path tracing in an open-world environment at 60fps. No Unreal Engine 5 game runs anywhere near as smooth at that fidelity. It's saddening seeing people champion CDPR moving away from their cutting edge proprietary engine to downgrade to UE5. The amount of time it would take to refactor and optimise the engine to get it to perform like the Red Engine 3 would take multiple years.

[@DaDoubleDee]

CDPR had almost half their studio leave during/after CP77 launch, they switched to UE5 because there was no one left to develop the Red Engine in a meaningful way. The Red Engine is seriously so good, I was sad that they switched over. UE5 had great marketing but the reality is Epic wants the monopoly.

[@anonymouseovermouse1960]

To be fair, Unreal Engine 4 and 5 specifically have render pipelines which are pretty damn difficult to modify by devs. It's not like with Unity that you can enable, disable, and replace rendering functionality, no. In UE, you do your rendering the Epic way, or you don't do it at all. Unless you're willing to rewrite half of the stupid engine's rendering-related code. It actually does have a lot of restrictions and guard rails for a lot of graphical things specifically. I mean i love the blueprint system and the file management system, and the level editor, but the engine's graphical capabilities are hyper-optimized to do one thing and one thing only. To the point that there are cases where you can't add certain details to a level because the devs didn't think of optimizing the usage of whatever graphical effect you wanted to add, even when such effects work fine in other engines. Like, idk, cubemap reflections or something. There's a few others too, but i forget.

[@Billy-bc8pk]

This is such a spot-on comment. People should also look at the painstaking process Arc System Works went through to rewrite the renderer for per-pixel rendering to get that cinematic cartoon cel-shaded look for their fighting games. They used the heck out of that rendering refactor for multiple games, but it was well worth the time and investment they put into it to achieve that result. They discuss the details of it during a dev talk at one of those events, can't remember the name, but it's well worth a watch.

[@anonymouseovermouse1960]

@@Billy-bc8pk Thanks man! And that does sound interesting, i'll have to read up about them

[@trashboatex]

​@@Billy-bc8pkCDEC

[@reecesx]

What's even worse is read harded people like the video poster will unironically narrate how fantastic unreals graphic pipelines are, like at 4:40 .5, all the while showing a roblox mod looking truck model, broken puddle displacements, a building being blown out by screen space bloom, a wall of that aforementioned building being clamped to just white [1, 1, 1, 1] because of direct sunlight, a blurry mess of everything (not even dof/bokeh or motion blur. it just looks gross), and a plasticy BRDF, but hey, at least it has tons of procedurally generated prefab spam. Yea, good luck fixing up that totally adjustable diy toolbox of an engine. I thought we moved past prefab spam and empty height map based open world generators but i guess that's what the zoomies and consooomers want now

[@anonymouseovermouse1960]

@@reecesx This might be the most correct and funniest fucking post i read all day lmao, you're absolutely right. Though i mean, with enough tinkering, you can get UE graphics to look kinda decent, like Fallen Order imo, but yeah that matrix demo is ass. I do also wanna mention that the wall being clamped to pure white is bc of the roughness and specular values. UE4 (at least) has next to no documentation about how to set them up to look good, and what you can achieve when modifying a material's specular and roughness. Actually, what documentation exists on the topic tells you to not touch the specular value at all (lol) which results in that disgusting smear of white light on surfaces regardless of the roughness value. And of course the concept of modifying the engine's lighting model within the editor to achieve different results is completely foreign, you have to once again refactor half of the engine to change anything meaningful. Edit: just to drive the point home, this issue in the engine, as well as documentation results in many UE games, for example Atomic Heart, in having those white smears. In that game, once you go to any underground bunker with wooden flooring and with a light source nearby, if you look at it from most angles, half of the wood texture turns yellowish gray, thanks to specular smearing. Not to mention the 20 other smeary and/or temporally unstable and undersampled effects used in UE games. Epic encourages this shit lol.

[@frahohen]

Creativity is dead. Welcome to the century of banality. 😢

[@I-Dcompany]

We have few exceptions and by God they are good

[@Danlovar]

No dev wants to make a game that has broken mechanics.

[@Psychotoxic86]

Unreal Engine 5 is stuttering mess and mostly nobody can optimize it properly. Sooo...when gamers started to like broken sh@t?

[@hawaiithispunch1799]

The AAA industry has ruined themselves, it has nothing to do with UE

[@Aurik-Kal-Durin]

If they made a new Halo game on the Halo 3 engine or the Halo: Reach engine in 2025, I would probably buy it. Yeah, the graphics aren't as good as what can be made today on Unreal Engine 5, but they look good enough, and the core gameplay of those games has always been a lot of fun.

[@simonak9699]

Clickbait titles are ruining KZbin... Would you say "Power tools are ruining woodworking", "Photoshop is ruining 2D art", "Davinci Resolve is ruining moviemaking" ? Of course not, because it's preposterous. That idea that you have to code your own game engine from scratch to create "Art" is utterly ridiculous. The engine is a TOOL, nothing more. It's what you do with it that matters.

[@rein6548]

RAGE Engine and ID Tech Engine are amazing

[@Intamin]

ID tech has had major texture pop-in issues in the past, have those been solved?

[@winky1116]

Epic having a monopoly on the game engine scene is a legit concern, however the rest of the video describes a problem that is not specific to UE5. UE5 is a tool, and if developers are too lazy to go beyond a simple asset flip because the default settings look pretty already, that's a developer issue, not an engine one. Also people tend to forget that Unreal is used for much, much more than game development, which is why _some_ of the photorealism features were implemented with intentions besides making games.

[@junechevalier]

Red Engine might be more capable in terms of fidelity, but are we forgetting how Cyberpunk performed when it came out?? Also Wukong was built on UE5, I think it was good. The problem isn’t the engine, the problem is lack of creativity

[@FU_SU_LU]

Not every game needs to be photorealistic, hell, most games don't need to be...

[@trashboatex]

Exactly look at Legend of zelda windwaker it's a game that's 22 years old on gamecube, and the art still lives today. That's the true power of art direction.

[@DropletPlant]

it has nothing to do with engine but devs.Its devs CHOICE on visual art if tey want to go 2D,3d,photo realism 3D,stylized 2d/3d,stylizzed-realistic or something else....

[@RezaQin]

If the game doesn't run at 60 FPS minimum, no thanks.

[@justanorange2038]

why are people scapegoating the frickin' engine? It ain't the engine fault, for fuck's sake. It's the companies.

[@Orys-k1g]

Have you even watched the video?

[@thearbitersteven6503]

The gaming industry is falling apart like the IT industry. Outsourcing and poor management (layoffs caused by corporation greed) is causing so many issues. Corporate greed is ruining everything.

[@Mukna132]

Tl;dw there is nothing wrong with Unreal. Just the games that we see made with it.