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[memoryman3]

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/developer-interviews/clair-obscur-expedition-33-autonomy-creativity-and-community-key-to-sandfall-interactives-success

Unreal's Blueprints feature allowed the director and many non technical developers to work with the game logic hands on.

"Guillaume is not a programmer—he doesn't know how to do C++," says Guillermin. "But it was important to enable him to work on the project."

Unreal Engine's Blueprint visual scripting system proved to be the perfect tool to bridge the gap between the two roles. "All the core logic of the game actually ended up being Blueprints—even the features entirely made by programmers," says Guillermin. "It was a faster way for us to innovate on the gameplay instead of trying to iterate on the heavy technical stuff that we just didn't have the manpower for."

In this way, Blueprint enabled the entire team to contribute to the game. "As we moved forward and the team grew, everybody was Blueprint-fluent and they would contribute directly in the code logic," explains Guillermin. "Everybody had a lot of freedom to do their job thanks to that particular tool."

Nanite allowed the team to create beautful worlds with less manpower than AAA productions.

"As a small team, you don't have all the resources to create all the levels of LODs manually," says Guillermin. "Nanite made our artists' lives much simpler."

Interesting to see that Unreal Blueprints, Nanite and Lumen, features infamous for degrading performance, contributed so much towards creating 2025's most critically acclaimed game. Does this have negative implications for lower end devices like the Switch 2 and other handhelds?

 

[analog_future]

The engine was never the problem. Plenty of games look and run great on UE5.

 

[keraj37]

UE5 is open source, so theoreticly any team using it can tailor it to its needs same fashion as proprietary engines do. But it is very hard task.

 

[DonkeyPunchJr]

I think that as games become more complex and expensive to develop, an engine that makes development faster and simpler is going to trump almost any other concern.

 

[Kikorin]

Watching my brother playing it on Steam Deck lately and is a torture, looks horrible and works even worst. Then you have games that looks and works beautiful with a fraction of the hardware power needed.

I see that an engine like UE5 can make things faster for devs, but at a huge cost.

 

[Teslerum]

UE5 issues are very real, but all of its advantages are very real too.

Clair Obscur is a beautiful game (Especially with the Ultra Plus mod which I highly recommend), but it would have never been as beautful without the tools UE5 provides artists and programmers. Which are second to none.

 

[Mister Wolf]

Looking forward to their next game using it. Hopefully they are competent with it like Bloober and Obsidian.

 

[Loomy]

Watching my brother playing it on Steam Deck lately and is a torture, looks horrible and works even worst. Then you have games that looks and works beautiful with a fraction of the hardware power needed.

I see that an engine like UE5 can make things faster for devs, but at a huge cost.

It really comes down to optimization. There are UE5 games that run very well on Steam Deck.

Also, the "Steam Deck Verified" label is quickly approaching being useless. A lot of games with the badge should not have it.

 

[YCoCg]

UE5 itself isn't bad, especially now, it was undercooked at the start but since like 5.4/5.5 it's been pretty efficient if the Devs want it to be

 

[Generic]

Tim won.

 

[Fake]

Please someone use Snowdrop.

 

[adamsapple]

Please someone use Snowdrop.

Even Ubisoft barely uses it ..