Unreal Engine is slowly causing the decay of the industry, what can be done?

L

LakeOf9

Member
I do appreciate the democratization of game development with Unreal Engine and Unity being as pervasive as they are. They are the reason indie games have been able to take off the way they have. Games like Expedition 33 and Hollow Knight Silksong are only possible because of Unreal and Unity.

But I think these engines are doing more harm ton the industry than not at this point, especially Unreal Engine. Unreal Engine is a massive, bloated piece of tech requiring an insane amount of overhead, especially if the games are utilizing some of its more sophisticated features, which makes games run horribly – not just on low end hardware with few spare resources such as the OG Switch or mobiles, but also, increasingly, on higher end hardware. Games are stuttery messes even on PS5 Pro or high end PCs, and shit like stutter and traversal stutter is a never ending nightmare at this point.

It's getting worse – the technical standard of games has gotten horrible, but more importantly, we are now reaching a point where an entire generation of developers in the industry only have the skill set to work with Unreal and Unity, and no skill set to work with proprietary tech stacks at all. This makes the problem self perpetuating, and it means unoptimized games that barely utilize the hardware they are running on are becoming more and more common as time goes on.

Is there no fix to the problem? I can't believe I am saying this, but I really wish publishers and developers would start using their own internal tech stacks and engines for development again.
 
Gaming visuals are now very technically complex, you can't expect devs to make their own 3D engines from scratch like they did in the past.

Anyone remember all the ugly Renderware PS2 games?
 
LakeOf9 said:
Unreal Engine is a massive, bloated piece of tech requiring an insane amount of overhead, especially if the games are utilizing some of its more sophisticated features, which makes games run horribly
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Have you ever developed a game with that engine or any game at all?
If no, then why do you believe you have the expertise for a valid judgement?
 
Invest in better hardware for one. I recommend at least an RTX 5070 16GB or possibly even a 24GB VRAM card for next-gen. Secondly, don't expect 60fps for every game. Some games just aren't built around that target.

There are some issues that need to be sorted on Epic and Microsoft's end (shaders!) but overall the engine's ease of use has allowed for some incredible games to exist that couldn't have otherwise.
 
The problem goes beyond the gaming industry, we are seeing a crisis within software engineering as a whole. I wouldn't say the problem are those engines themselves, but the fact they became too standard, and often get used as crutches.
 
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sncvsrtoip said:
Waiting for SlimySnake SlimySnake opinion :messenger_sunglasses:
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And I nominate kevboard kevboard

gus sorola omg GIF by Rooster Teeth
 
Guilty_AI said:
The problem goes beyond the gaming industry, we are seeing a crisis within software engineering as a whole. I wouldn't say the problem are those engines themselves, but the fact they became too standard, and often get used as crutches.
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Yep. Why do you think your piece of shit Chromium-based browser needs 5GB of RAM to keep a plain text web page open lol? Caching isn't the only answer.
 
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LakeOf9 said:
I do appreciate the democratization of game development with Unreal Engine and Unity being as pervasive as they are. They are the reason indie games have been able to take off the way they have. Games like Expedition 33 and Hollow Knight Silksong are only possible because of Unreal and Unity.

But I think these engines are doing more harm ton the industry than not at this point, especially Unreal Engine. Unreal Engine is a massive, bloated piece of tech requiring an insane amount of overhead, especially if the games are utilizing some of its more sophisticated features, which makes games run horribly – not just on low end hardware with few spare resources such as the OG Switch or mobiles, but also, increasingly, on higher end hardware. Games are stuttery messes even on PS5 Pro or high end PCs, and shit like stutter and traversal stutter is a never ending nightmare at this point.

It's getting worse – the technical standard of games has gotten horrible, but more importantly, we are now reaching a point where an entire generation of developers in the industry only have the skill set to work with Unreal and Unity, and no skill set to work with proprietary tech stacks at all. This makes the problem self perpetuating, and it means unoptimized games that barely utilize the hardware they are running on are becoming more and more common as time goes on.

Is there no fix to the problem? I can't believe I am saying this, but I really wish publishers and developers would start using their own internal tech stacks and engines for development again.
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Are you a game developer? What are your accreditation to come to the conclusion of this? Do you have any project in UE5 in which you can demonstrate what's wrong with it?
 
The only thing that can be done is to find high quality game developers. The current batch we have today I've not been much impressed with.
 
They are doing zero harm, nobody is forcing large developers to use ready as is engines instead without becoming experts at it or just building their own.
 
I have a PC - it's a 2700x with a 2080. I've no plans to upgrade it. It plays indie games fine, and I can play more demanding titles on Geforce Now. For most AAA games I play on my PS5 (which looks and runs good enough for me). I don't see the value in the current crop of GPU's - especially when GFN is like, 200 a year.
 
This stuff is cyclical. We are at the point where companies decided making their own tech is too expensive so they bought UE. In response to UE's unending problems, bad IQ, bad performance, devs will decide to make their own tech or force more of their teams to use it. Around and around we go.

Heck if you think about it most of the big companies have their own tech - EA, Ubi, Rockstar, Sony, Microsoft, etc. And in all those instances the tech has major advantages over UE in IQ and performance if not feature-for-feature (of course those features turn UE into a slow, choppy, fizzy mess).
 
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viveks86 said:
And I nominate kevboard kevboard

gus sorola omg GIF by Rooster Teeth
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I have shat on UE5 so much at this point, and provided examples of why it's the worst fucking engine on the market.

if anyone wants my opinion on it, just search my name in combination with Lumen 🤣

TLDR: fuck Lumen, fuck every dev that uses Lumen as a shortcut instead of properly baked gi, fuck TSR, and fuck the reliance on dithering for lighting, volumetrics, AO, shadows, hair, and transparencies.

edit:
also Star Wars Outlaws on Switch 2 just recently demonstrated just HOW UNFATHOMABLY DOGSHIT Unreal 5 is. that game's RT on Switch 2 is on par, and in parts superior, than some of the best Lumen implementations on PS5 and Series X... while running on an insanely gimped RTX30 series GPU.
meanwhile every UE5 game so far lacks Lumen entirely on Switch 2. why? because even at that DOGSHIT fidelity it runs at, it's still too much of a GPU and CPU strain to be able to work.
this shows just how far behind the rest of the industry UE5 is... Snowdrop's RT outshines UE5's RT on the fucking Switch 2.
 
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You don't have to be a Tech Leader, Architect, Expert Developer with 10 years of experience or whatever to have an opinion about Unreal Engine 5. Because as a player, and a consumer, you buy products that use this engine. And you can perfectly see the patterns.

If you feel that games using this engine don't perform at the level you expect, the simplest thing to do is to not buy said games.
 
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Guilty_AI said:
The problem goes beyond the gaming industry, we are seeing a crisis within software engineering as a whole. I wouldn't say the problem are those engines themselves, but the fact they became too standard, and often get used as crutches.
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Agreed. And I wouldn't even say this is because of AI. It's a bunch of problems that all culminate into software developers being less capable each passing year.

Until a year or two ago I saw companies hire people whose experience was literally just a 3 or 6 month intensive programming bootcamp which taught them nothing but the basics of coding and absolutely no data design or modelling skills whatsoever. AI for now at least is just weeding out those types of people.
Low-level and dynamic programming is a dying breed, 95% of the enterprise coding you have nowadays is simple API calls and data manipulation and then you add easy to use tools like Appian or in the game industry's case Unreal Engine and all you get is software developers who technically can develop a game but could not for the life of them go deep into the code and begin reverse engineering it and optimizing it.
 
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cireza said:
You don't have to be a Tech Leader, Architect, Expert Developer with 10 years of experience or whatever to have an opinion about Unreal Engine 5. Because as a player, and a consumer, you buy products that use this engine. And you can perfectly see the patterns.

If you feel that games using this engine don't perform at the level you expect, the simplest thing to do is to not buy said games.
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Exactly. The consumer is always right and as a consumer, if I see most UE5 games performing like shit then I'll just stop buying the games made with it.

Some corpo-lickers will try to shut you down with stupid arguments like "you don't make games" or "we'll lets see you doing better". I don't need to, my money is mine and if UE5 is a piece of shit then that's a problem for them to solve, not me.
 
Burger said:
I have a PC - it's a 2700x with a 2080. I've no plans to upgrade it. It plays indie games fine, and I can play more demanding titles on Geforce Now. For most AAA games I play on my PS5 (which looks and runs good enough for me). I don't see the value in the current crop of GPU's - especially when GFN is like, 200 a year.
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You should be able to play AAA games on that better than on a PS5, unless you are getting CPU bottlenecked?
 
TintoConCasera said:
Exactly. The consumer is always right
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If the consumer is always right, then why is it surprising that we see more and more GAAS games?
Obviously thats exactly what the consumer wants and spends money for!
TintoConCasera said:
and as a consumer, if I see most UE5 games performing like shit then
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Developers and publishers also decide what to do with their money - and they pick Unreal and you cant change that.
TintoConCasera said:
I'll just stop buying the games made with it.
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Haha, soon you wont have anything left to buy anymore as more devs will switch to it.
TintoConCasera said:
Some corpo-lickers will try to shut you down with stupid arguments like "you don't make games" or "we'll lets see you doing better". I don't need to, my money is mine and if UE5 is a piece of shit then that's a problem for them to solve, not me.
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One does not have to be a corporate bootlicker to demand that someone who posts an opinion about something to have at least a basic understanding of it.
 
Unreal Engine have issues but imagine the dev times if devs made their own engines instead. We're already at the point where 5 years is considered normal.
 
are there even any games made not using the two stated engines? I do see the red pill with shooters. Like its all the same game but with a different skin.
 
If these engines didn't exist, we wouldn't have even a fraction of the smaller games released.
The problems with the engines are either tech related or user repeated. epic has stated that the performance issues are user (dev) related.
Even if that's true, with the number of projects that have similar issues, it still points to fault with with the engine. Epic either needs to improve the tech to not allow for the devs to make the mistakes that allow for this to happen or they need to improve eduction enough to make it so devs know better.
 
LakeOf9 said:
I do appreciate the democratization of game development with Unreal Engine and Unity being as pervasive as they are. They are the reason indie games have been able to take off the way they have. Games like Expedition 33 and Hollow Knight Silksong are only possible because of Unreal and Unity.

But I think these engines are doing more harm ton the industry than not at this point, especially Unreal Engine. Unreal Engine is a massive, bloated piece of tech requiring an insane amount of overhead, especially if the games are utilizing some of its more sophisticated features, which makes games run horribly – not just on low end hardware with few spare resources such as the OG Switch or mobiles, but also, increasingly, on higher end hardware. Games are stuttery messes even on PS5 Pro or high end PCs, and shit like stutter and traversal stutter is a never ending nightmare at this point.

It's getting worse – the technical standard of games has gotten horrible, but more importantly, we are now reaching a point where an entire generation of developers in the industry only have the skill set to work with Unreal and Unity, and no skill set to work with proprietary tech stacks at all. This makes the problem self perpetuating, and it means unoptimized games that barely utilize the hardware they are running on are becoming more and more common as time goes on.

Is there no fix to the problem? I can't believe I am saying this, but I really wish publishers and developers would start using their own internal tech stacks and engines for development again.
Click to expand...
The source code for Unreal Engine 5 is on GitHub. Jump in and start cutting the bloat, then open a request to merge your changes from the fork. I'm sure you'll find it isn't a simple task, but you seem motivated.
 
Not even the engine, every game looks exactly the same that uses Unreal Engine. All the 2.5d fighting games look the same. All the 3rd person over the shoulder games are identical. All the first person shooters...
 
The problem is the engine itself. We can't fix it, only epic can.

The problem is the engine can be used to create work that cannot then be corrected afterwards. If a flaw was created upon the initial thought process for the game it cannot be corrected without redoing all the work.

Imagine if a consumer level product was released in this state. It would be considered broken. Imagine if you had to manually rewrite a paper to add page numbers to it.

The proper fix is to allow the code entered into the application to be app settings agnostic. Then allow the settings to dynamically apply to the work product. This would allow the work product itself to be portable and not tied to errors made before the project even began. This will also prevent a finished product from being able to be fixed. I know nothing about this technically and this is just a guess, but the next iteration of the engine will likely do just that. These layers need to be automated and independent. With AI this should now be possible. Epic caused this epic has to fix it. When they tell us the issue is inexperienced devs, the software needs to be based around the least experienced dev. It should and indeed does not need to require high level expertise to implement properly and it does not need to cause technical issues in finished software based off not having proper tutorials, warnings, and safeguards in place. This is a problem that must be and will be fixed in the software itself. We can't do anything about it since the default engine has already been chosen, we just have to wait for updates and dev cycles to get out of this.
 
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GateofD said:
are there even any games made not using the two stated engines? I do see the red pill with shooters. Like its all the same game but with a different skin.
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Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 uses Crytek. Game looks and runs wonderfully.
 
TintoConCasera said:
Exactly. The consumer is always right and as a consumer, if I see most UE5 games performing like shit then I'll just stop buying the games made with it.

Some corpo-lickers will try to shut you down with stupid arguments like "you don't make games" or "we'll lets see you doing better". I don't need to, my money is mine and if UE5 is a piece of shit then that's a problem for them to solve, not me.
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That's the most Karen answer if i ever saw one. I hope you dont go with this rhetoric to your doctor, lawyer or engineer when you want a service from them.
 
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Zacfoldor said:
The problem is the engine itself. We can't fix it, only epic can.

The problem is the engine can be used to create work that cannot then be corrected afterwards. If a flaw was created upon the initial thought process for the game it cannot be corrected without redoing all the work.

Imagine if a consumer level product was released in this state. It would be considered broken. Imagine if you had to manually rewrite a paper to add page numbers to it.

The proper fix is to allow the code entered into the application to be app settings agnostic. Then allow the settings to dynamically apply to the work product. This would allow the work product itself to be portable and not tied to errors made before the project even began. This will also prevent a finished product from being able to be fixed. I know nothing about this technically and this is just a guess, but the next iteration of the engine will likely do just that. These layers need to be automated and independent. With AI this should now be possible. Epic caused this epic has to fix it. When they tell us the issue is inexperienced devs, the software needs to be based around the least experienced dev. It should and indeed does not need to require high level expertise to implement properly and it does not need to cause technical issues in finished software based off not having proper tutorials, warnings, and safeguards in place. This is a problem that must be and will be fixed in the software itself. We can't do anything about it since the default engine has already been chosen, we just have to wait for updates and dev cycles to get out of this.
Click to expand...
Question Mark What GIF by MOODMAN
 
Games need to be properly scoped for their hardware, as do engines.

We need to remember that the first unreal engine 5 demo was running at 1440p 30fps and now we are expecting games to be 4k 60.

Developers need to stop trying to push the engine that it clearly wasn't built to do. And on that same topic, Epic needs to do better and make an engine that isnt garbage.
 
LakeOf9 said:
I do appreciate the democratization of game development with Unreal Engine and Unity being as pervasive as they are. They are the reason indie games have been able to take off the way they have. Games like Expedition 33 and Hollow Knight Silksong are only possible because of Unreal and Unity.

But I think these engines are doing more harm ton the industry than not at this point, especially Unreal Engine. Unreal Engine is a massive, bloated piece of tech requiring an insane amount of overhead, especially if the games are utilizing some of its more sophisticated features, which makes games run horribly – not just on low end hardware with few spare resources such as the OG Switch or mobiles, but also, increasingly, on higher end hardware. Games are stuttery messes even on PS5 Pro or high end PCs, and shit like stutter and traversal stutter is a never ending nightmare at this point.

It's getting worse – the technical standard of games has gotten horrible, but more importantly, we are now reaching a point where an entire generation of developers in the industry only have the skill set to work with Unreal and Unity, and no skill set to work with proprietary tech stacks at all. This makes the problem self perpetuating, and it means unoptimized games that barely utilize the hardware they are running on are becoming more and more common as time goes on.

Is there no fix to the problem? I can't believe I am saying this, but I really wish publishers and developers would start using their own internal tech stacks and engines for development again.
Click to expand...
What is your job?
Gaming programmer?
Game director?
Market analyst?
Have you got any data or analysis to support your statement?

Or do you have a lot of free time?
 
I mean, they (devs) could gather around (isn't GDC for that?) and talk about it together, as one big team possibly, no? Talk, discuss, make efforts to change things that need to be.
That Threat Interactive guy on YT seems to tackle some stuff, but I can't say if he's all legit or not, seems he is somewhat. Devs need to fight to bring the best of their work.
 
Saying UE5 is ruining the industry ignores all the games running UE5 that run just fine.

Is there a problem? Absolutely. From everything I've read and heard from developers, it comes down to shitty documentation for a lot of new workflows and systems, bloated videos, and a lack of time spent by studios on guided training for their devs from Epic (which Epic conveniently charges for).

Sounds like it's on studios to slow the fuck down and properly train their devs, and it's on Epic to actually do a better job training and supporting studios.

LakeOf9 said:
It's getting worse – the technical standard of games has gotten horrible, but more importantly, we are now reaching a point where an entire generation of developers in the industry only have the skill set to work with Unreal and Unity, and no skill set to work with proprietary tech stacks at all. This makes the problem self perpetuating, and it means unoptimized games that barely utilize the hardware they are running on are becoming more and more common as time goes on.
Click to expand...
Imagine complaining that entire generations of developers are developing skills in React, PHP, and Python. The problem with proprietary tech stack is that they're proprietary. So if you work for 5 years on an engine, then go work at another studio, you're spending time learning a new proprietary engine.

LakeOf9 said:
Is there no fix to the problem? I can't believe I am saying this, but I really wish publishers and developers would start using their own internal tech stacks and engines for development again.
Click to expand...
You can't have that and also bring costs down. The reason a lot of studios use UE is because they don't have to pay a whole team to maintain and develop their engine. They also save money on training new employees. Someone coming from another studio using UE to your studio using UE can get going right away. Someone coming from Guerilla using Decima, to your studio using UE is going to need more ramp up time. That's time that they could be contributing to the project.
 
theHFIC said:
Not even the engine, every game looks exactly the same that uses Unreal Engine. All the 2.5d fighting games look the same. All the 3rd person over the shoulder games are identical. All the first person shooters...
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This just brought back memories to the days before Arkham Asylum was released. I remember MANY people on this very forum automatically assuming it was going to be trash because it was using UE3 (or whatever version it was). "Every character looks like a Gears character" was a common sentiment.

Then it comes out and blows the socks off of everyone, becoming the best comic book videogame TO THIS DAY.
 
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