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Unreal Engine 5 is bad, m'kay?

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Unreal Engine 5 is bad, m'kay?

Post by logincrash »

Unreal Engine 5 sucks **** and is a blight on the video game industry. It's the first and most obvious sign that the game is lazy slop made either by some indie ***** or by outsourcing to incompetent *****.

It's ugly and it runs like **** and it's spreading like cancer.

I posted this video before, but it's a great channel that goes into in-depth technical details on the topic of video game graphics and performance optimization.


Useful Steam Curator that confirms whether the game is made in UE5 or not:
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/45663803

Recent examples that I personally saw on this forum:
Hell is Us
Still Wakes the Deep
Abiotic Factor
Death Relives

Basically, the future of vidya is grim. All the countless remakes of old games are and will be made in UE5 by soulless husks. The majority of new games will look the same. All of them will take up hundreds of gigabytes of space and perform poorly even on a NASA supercomputer.
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Post by rusty_shackleford »

People thinking Expedition 33 looks good is a mental illness
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Post by logincrash »

rusty_shackleford wrote: September 9th, 2025, 06:30
People thinking Expedition 33 looks good is a mental illness
Its art direction is hampered by the engine. Sure, the fantasy France and its populace are prettily designed, but them being rendered in UE5 makes them look far worse than they actually do.
Last edited by logincrash on September 9th, 2025, 07:19, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by KnightoftheWind »

Unreal Engine 5 is based and wholesome tho, because 90% of PC gaymers can't even play UE5 gaymes at a decent framerate. This means less gaymes sold, and ultimately less ******/pajeets infesting the hobby. You should be on your KNEES thanking Tim Sweeney for his subversive genius!
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Post by Oyster Sauce »

It looks good and has never given me performance issues ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Post by Tangerine »

Regardless of the quality or performance, most games in UE5 look the same because nobody bothers to change the defaults. Gives me a "been there, done that" vibe.
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Post by sheet »

Is there any Unreal Engine 4 or 5 game that actually plays like Unreal Tournament? All these movie games just slow roll the scenery, nothing seems to ever just create battle arenas unless they're extremely gay looking like Concord.
(I played the Unreal Tournament 2014 beta in the last week before they took it offline :salute: :sad: )
Last edited by sheet on September 10th, 2025, 00:01, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by J1M »

Sad because Unreal used to be a great and easily moddable engine.
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Post by rusty_shackleford »

J1M wrote: September 10th, 2025, 00:05
Sad because Unreal used to be a great and easily moddable engine.
Epic is the Fortnite company, it's obvious they barely care about the actual quality of their tools beyond its usability with Fortnite
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Post by rusty_shackleford »

I generally agree with the video(end is him shilling for money, so skip it), I was surprised to learn that UE5 uses lambert diffuse and he's right that could be a contributing factor for the distinct 'UE4/5 look'. I've written about this before where the cost of actually changing the defaults in Unreal is really high because so much rests upon the defaults being what they are that you will end up having to rewrite a significant portion of the rendering pipeline. It's why a certain 'look' that is hard to describe is often associated with a certain engine regardless of it being used with a wide range of artstyles. Even things that are trivial to change are still often left at their defaults tho e.g., I've seen AA-tier Unity games using the default spotlight cookie and been able to instantly identify it as a Unity game from screenshots due to it.

[edit]
No reason for his hostile tone, however.
Last edited by rusty_shackleford on September 10th, 2025, 00:25, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by TheEmptyRoad »

Oh well, their loss. I’ve got a massive backlog on both Steam and GoG to play through. The ‘AAA’ game industry can continue to limp along into poverty.

I already side-eye games over like 50ish Gigabytes big.
If they’re really trying to force people to play just their **** and no one else's it won’t end well. The Message came to vidya gaming too late, let it and its slop wither and die.
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Post by DecadeRiptide »

logincrash wrote: September 9th, 2025, 06:28
Unreal Engine 5 sucks **** and is a blight on the video game industry. It's the first and most obvious sign that the game is lazy slop made either by some indie ***** or by outsourcing to incompetent *****.

It's ugly and it runs like **** and it's spreading like cancer.

I posted this video before, but it's a great channel that goes into in-depth technical details on the topic of video game graphics and performance optimization.


Useful Steam Curator that confirms whether the game is made in UE5 or not:
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/45663803

Recent examples that I personally saw on this forum:
Hell is Us
Still Wakes the Deep
Abiotic Factor
Death Relives

Basically, the future of vidya is grim. All the countless remakes of old games are and will be made in UE5 by soulless husks. The majority of new games will look the same. All of them will take up hundreds of gigabytes of space and perform poorly even on a NASA supercomputer.
I set up my own Curator for this a couple years ago and then realised I was too lazy to actually add to it.

I don't think you even need a curator anyway as you can usually tell a game is made in unreal engine just by looking at it. That being said I guess it's more convenient to see a tag.

Usually I avoid unreal engine 5 games as much as possible. It is awful. CryEngine looks better than UE5 games as well, more developers should use it.
Last edited by DecadeRiptide on September 10th, 2025, 02:59, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by rusty_shackleford »

Has Valve ever commented on why they aren't more open with licensing Source 2? Their tools have long been considered some of the best around.
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Post by J1M »

rusty_shackleford wrote: October 3rd, 2025, 22:56
Has Valve ever commented on why they aren't more open with licensing Source 2? Their tools have long been considered some of the best around.
If you want to believe the mythology of Valve it's because nobody that works there formed an ad-hoc internal team to develop that into a product.
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Post by KnightoftheWind »

rusty_shackleford wrote: October 3rd, 2025, 22:56
Has Valve ever commented on why they aren't more open with licensing Source 2? Their tools have long been considered some of the best around.
I remember hearing a 'decade' ago that Valve wanted to release Source 2 under a Free Software license, or something to that effect. 10 years later it still hasn't happened, and shows no sign of ever happening. You'd think with how much Valve champions Linux and the Free Software ecosystem, that they would contribute more to the effort. At LEAST publish Goldsrc and Source 1.0 under a GPL license or something, if nothing more than to throw older fans a bone and to allow indie devs the opportunity to make stuff with it. The "Source aesthetic" remains iconic to a lot of people.

Just by making their tech publicly available and free to iterate on, they throw a wrench into Epic Games' monopoly. Could even provide incentives for devs to use Source instead of UE, by lowering their 30% fee to 25% or something.
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Post by logincrash »

rusty_shackleford wrote: September 10th, 2025, 00:17
I generally agree with the video(end is him shilling for money, so skip it), I was surprised to learn that UE5 uses lambert diffuse and he's right that could be a contributing factor for the distinct 'UE4/5 look'. I've written about this before where the cost of actually changing the defaults in Unreal is really high because so much rests upon the defaults being what they are that you will end up having to rewrite a significant portion of the rendering pipeline. It's why a certain 'look' that is hard to describe is often associated with a certain engine regardless of it being used with a wide range of artstyles. Even things that are trivial to change are still often left at their defaults tho e.g., I've seen AA-tier Unity games using the default spotlight cookie and been able to instantly identify it as a Unity game from screenshots due to it.

[edit]
No reason for his hostile tone, however.
A more in-depth look into the different diffusion models:

As for the hostile tone, I feel it's justified. A lot of people find games made in UE5 ugly, and they go with the "vidya graphix are too realistic" argument. When the reality is that UE5 is a **** engine that is **** and makes everything look like **** thus giving "realistic graphics" a bad name. He's frustrated by that and is angry in a "stolen valor" kinda way.
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Post by Fox1 »

This engine looks and runs like complete *** and the lighting system is dogshit. I have yet to see a single developer competent enough to release a game using it that isn't an unoptimized bag of **** that brings $2000 GPUs to their knees with mediocre blurry graphics
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Post by fork »

I think it's not much different than the hate for Unity:

Easy to use widespread, relatively capable all-purpose engines getting hate because they're used my mega-corps and ***** to save costs on maintining a more purpose-built in-house engine which requires capable devs to produce something worthwhile (and you can't simply get rid of the dudes who coded the thing because then it becomes worthless overnight).
There are great Unity games, there are good UE5 games, but those were developed by devs who care, not ****-drones.

Still would prefer more in-house engines, but that's my take. Suits don't want a great engine which requires professionals, they want something that every ****** can use and still produce something your average wage-slave can consume after work.
Last edited by fork on October 27th, 2025, 12:05, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by rusty_shackleford »

fork wrote: October 27th, 2025, 12:05
I think it's not much different than the hate for Unity:

Easy to use widespread, relatively capable all-purpose engines getting hate because they're used my mega-corps and ***** to save costs on maintining a more purpose-built in-house engine which requires capable devs to produce something worthwhile (and you can't simply get rid of the dudes who coded the thing because then it becomes worthless overnight).
There are great Unity games, there are good UE5 games, but those were developed by devs who care, not ****-drones.

Still would prefer more in-house engines, but that's my take. Suits don't want a great engine which requires professionals, they want something that every ****** can use and still produce something your average wage-slave can consume after work.
UE5's problems are largely technical, unity's problems were the quality of the games. 9 out of 10 UE5 games run like absolute **** and the 10th one is a low poly indie game
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Post by fork »

Latest examples of good UE5-games are imo Wuchang (yes, that has a plethora of problems, but performance is ok, considering they were indie-devs til now and Wuchang was their first ambitious project) and Tormented Souls 2, which looks and runs great imo (unfortunately it's a sub-par Survival Horror game).
I think capable devs could make outstanding UE5-games, but that's not what the engine exists for, it exists for ***** to **** out acceptable shovelware.

Maybe I'm just being contrarian/devil's advocate because I don't like the mug and demeanor of that UE5-hater dude in his videos. A John Carmack he certainly isn't.
Last edited by fork on October 27th, 2025, 12:18, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by MrTwinkls »

Supposedly Metal Eden uses UE5 and doesn't look like generic game on this engine. Haven't played it yet though.
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Post by rusty_shackleford »

fork wrote: October 27th, 2025, 12:15
Maybe I'm just being contrarian/devil's advocate because I don't like the mug and demeanor of that UE5-hater dude in his videos. A John Carmack he certainly isn't.
agreed, the guy is overly arrogant and often just rude
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Post by Valter »

This is UE5 as well. looks great and has the recommended specs of a 2020 entry-level PC. Skill issue.

Last edited by Valter on October 27th, 2025, 13:14, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by fork »

It's Sonic though. :broken:
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Post by fork »

Sonic furries confirmed more competent than the rest of the industry.
Maybe all these and similar degenerates were right all along. :/
Last edited by fork on October 27th, 2025, 13:25, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by KnightoftheWind »

Valter wrote: October 27th, 2025, 13:10
This is UE5 as well. looks great and has the recommended specs of a 2020 entry-level PC. Skill issue.

To be fair, newer versions of UE5 do improve on the engine's shortcomings. Perhaps Sonic uses a newer build compared to the ones used for, say, the SH2 Demake.

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Post by asf »

dont worry, ****** vibe coded engine will come soon
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Post by Fox1 »

asf wrote: October 27th, 2025, 17:23
dont worry, ****** vibe coded engine will come soon
It's already here? Pretty sure that is UE5 in a nutshell :broken:
Last edited by Fox1 on October 28th, 2025, 00:21, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by logincrash »

rusty_shackleford wrote: October 27th, 2025, 13:09
fork wrote: October 27th, 2025, 12:15
Maybe I'm just being contrarian/devil's advocate because I don't like the mug and demeanor of that UE5-hater dude in his videos. A John Carmack he certainly isn't.
agreed, the guy is overly arrogant and often just rude
Devs using UE5 and ******* up the graphics AND performance should be constantly berated. He should be calling them "*******" left and right and burning crosses on their lawns.
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Post by fork »

But he doesn't. He sips his own intellect while calling them '"incompetent" at best, while shilling his own solutions "which need funding", instead of just dropping a superior solution like Carmack or the CryEngine turk bros (Yerli iirc) back then. He's too full of himself with nothing to show for it, and asking for money on top.
Last edited by fork on October 31st, 2025, 08:47, edited 2 times in total.