It looks like **** because the assets look like ****, not because of the technology.Demonic Fate wrote: ↑ April 19th, 2025, 20:40Starfield had a budget of $400M. I can't find a budget figure for TOW2, but TOW1 was around $30-40M.Roguey wrote: ↑ April 19th, 2025, 19:40Here's The Outer Worlds 2, a 2025 Unreal Engine 5 space RPG.Demonic Fate wrote: ↑ April 19th, 2025, 18:35First: it doesn't look fine. Not for an AAA big-budget first person game from 2023; it's not an indie game, it needs to impress or at least charm.
Second: If you took the exact same assets? No. But I suspect that the Creation Engine's limitations are why those assets look like they came from 2012, with almost flat trees and a "capital city" with no infrastructure and a population of 62:
This does not completely blow Starfield away. Quality of the renderer doesn't have too much of an affect on engine-agnostic art style/assets. UE5 is definitely not going to help with crowd sizes, just the opposite more than likely. Unreal Engine sucks for open world games, even now. Vavra dunked on CDP for going with UE for the next Witcher https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/k ... l-engine-5
I imagine there are good reasons why devs aren't flocking to Cryengine ("too hard" most likely)"I talked with guys who are making The Witcher or from studios that are just trying to make some open-world games on Unreal because there aren't really any open-world games on Unreal. Assassin's Creed, everything like that, is on their own engine."
"CD Projekt just switched to Unreal. Even though, in my opinion, they had a good proprietary engine. I talked to someone whose name I obviously can't say, and I said to him, 'So how about Unreal?' 'Great, we already have pieces done, like some landscapes.' And I said, well, what about the open world? 'Not yet.' When did they announce it? A year or two ago, and it still doesn't work?"
Daniel later mentioned that Unreal Engine simply wasn't made for open-world games, nor terrain generation, "If you wanted to make a game on Unreal from some rocks, that's great, but it couldn't do trees for a long time. Their nanite couldn't generate vegetation until now. Now it can." Looking at you, Satisfactory.
He goes on to detail the amazing videos of trees and the life-like nature of the vegetation that's produced in Unreal Engine 5 but hammers it for performance. "Until you look at some demo and realize that while it looks absolutely divine. Photos, just like a movie. Then you need a computer that costs two hundred grands (8000 Euro), and a maximum of four people can walk there because otherwise, even the **** computer that costs two hundred grand will not be able to run it."
I agree that moving from REDEngine to UE5 is a weird choice. RED did amazing things for Night City: besides the crowds and lightning, there are quests where you need to take the elevator up to like the 80th floor, which in any other game would be a disguised area transition; in Cyberpunk it's seamless, you can jump off the balcony and see yourself splash on top of the same NPCs you walked past when entering the building. Getting UE5 to do the same looks like a crazy challenge (though CDProjekt has more resources than Bohemia Interactive).
But Bethesda doesn't have REDEngine. They have CE, and if they are unable to make their 2023 flagship game look better than Skyrim, what happens if their 2035 flagship still looks like that? Doing some experiments with different engines before committing to a big project makes sense.
https://www.mobygames.com/game/208288/s ... s/windows/
ctrl+F "3D', basically every single artist was outsourced
And here's your quarter of a billion dollars UE5 game
