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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 beautiful 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 ..

 

[damidu]

your game isnt the technical showcase, it still has the all the shader compilation stutter mess

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

meanwhile obsidian being all competent and shit,

 

[Arsic]

I love Clair 33, but the amount of unique assets is very small. A lot of the game environments are copy paste items dumped around the environment.

So it's easy to avoid certain pitfalls of UE5 when you aren't necessarily pushing it to do much. Clair is a lot of good things but it isn't pushing the envelope in visuals. If you told me it was a UE4 game I'd believe you.

 

[Crayon]

The best thing about ue5 has been seeing lower budget stuff come out with great graphics.

The recent ninja gaiden 2 black is a great example. Nobody really talks about the graphics. Most note that they're nice. But if you really look, there are a lot of elements of the graphics that are in or near the aaa-grade. Lumen in particular works great. It looks consistently good, and presumably makes it easier on your production line.

Actually another great example is robocop. Maybe a better example because it launched at a sub-$70 price bracket. So that better indicates that the budget was significantly under a aaa game. The graphics were great. Seriously impressive.

The downside is that it's so heavy to run. Lumen at the higher settings gets you a good stand-in for rtgi, but ironically it's still too heavy for ps5 to handle. On ps5, the really lightweight and effective rtgi solutions have been leading the charge. I don't know why that wouldn't be the case on console-level pcs. I'd like to see it more.

Currently on pc, using the higher non-hardware settings for lumen are real heavy. I had a 6800 (great card) that would do it comfortably at 1440p, but not with anything like the headroom of games with older gi methods. The games with super light rt can run on a 6600xt and get a similar effect. So rt is actually a win, here. I'm not bowled over by the heavy path tracing implementations, but the fast and usually required ones truly impress me and make me a lot more supportive of rt than I would be.

tldr Unreal 5 has made cheaper games have their graphics close the gap with higher budget games.

 

[SlimySnake]

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.

lol steamdeck? A handheld that's less powerful than a ps4 which itself was less powerful than 2011 era gpus.

This game runs at 60 fps on a base ps5. Who gives a shit what it does on a last Gen handheld.

 

[Mister Wolf]

lol steamdeck? A handheld that's less powerful than a ps4 which itself was less powerful than 2011 era gpus.

This game runs at 60 fps on a base ps5. Who gives a shit what it does on a last Gen handheld.

Never ceases to amaze me the ridiculous expectations PC players have for their old/weak ass hardware.

 

[Killer8]

I feel like the quote about using Blueprints really hammers home exactly why so many studios have shifted to it. People like Threat Interactive just don't get this - the biggest advantage to using the engine is that it allows even small AA size studios, people with little experience doing game dev, and those who have next to no budget, to make a game. You hear these longwinded autistic rants about "why couldn't the developer optimize the game more?", missing the forest for the trees that this would require several extra years of development, masses more money and finding people with expertise. UE5 has given a lot of people - pure hobbyists or students straight out of uni - the ability to actually make something easily. Without it, you wouldn't get Clair Obscur, you wouldn't get Konami taking a risk on Bloober making Silent Hill 2 remake, Virtuos doing the MGS3 remake, or China materializing Black Myth Wukong from thin air. And the visual results even just using the stock engine features and the Megascan textures speak for themselves. Every time there is a game show and an amazing looking game is shown, 99% of the time now it's a no name studio using UE5. I honestly do not give a single shite if the framerate isn't quite as high as people want or the image quality is a little bit blurry if it meant those developers could actually make the fucking game!

 

[CentralScrutinizer]

All the UE5 store purchased assets help, too.

 

[RoboFu]

To hate a game engine because of unoptimized games is like hating a hammer because the nails are crooked.

 

[Crayon]

To hate a game engine because of unoptimized games is like hating a hammer because the nails are crooked.

A poorly balanced hammer without a waffle face is poorly optimized, though.

 

[RoboFu]

A poorly balanced hammer without a waffle face is poorly optimized, though.

Then if you aren't skilled enough to use that hammer .. get another one.

 

[Kikorin]

lol steamdeck? A handheld that's less powerful than a ps4 which itself was less powerful than 2011 era gpus.

This game runs at 60 fps on a base ps5. Who gives a shit what it does on a last Gen handheld.

At 860p and not even looking that good lol.

Lot of players care, especially when you have games that looks miles better and works great using proprietary engines or even UE4. UE5 most of the time works bad, on last gen consoles too.

Is even an achievement for an engine to looks good only when maxed out, but being the most heavy and unoptimized price of shit out there? Not sure.

 

[Crayon]

Then if you aren't skilled enough to use that hammer .. get another one.

If you're a real hammer bro you must have used a crappy one at some point. I picked up once in a hurry a while ago and it had shitty balance and I replaced it because it was annoying to use. Hammering nails can actually be pretty nice.

 

[memoryman3]

At 860p and not even looking that good lol.

Lot of players care, especially when you have games that looks miles better and works great using proprietary engines or even UE4. UE5 most of the time works bad, on last gen consoles too.

Is even an achievement for an engine to looks good only when maxed out, but being the most heavy and unoptimized price of shit out there? Not sure.

It runs at near 1440p on PS5 and Series X, and looks great at the 30fps quality mode. Also runs well on the popular mid range setups. Developers shouldn't have to hold back their titles for handhelds or super high framerate targets, especially if the input lag added is imperceptible.

 

[vkbest]

Developers shouldn't have to hold back their titles for handhelds or super high framerate targets, especially if the input lag added is imperceptible.

The input lag in 30fps mode is bad on consoles. If you are ok with that input lag nice for you

 

[manlisten]

Can someone explain why, unlike most other UE5 games this gen, E33 does not prompt with a 5 minute "shader compilation" screen on PC when you launch it? All the while running better than 99% of UE5 games on the market.

It just goes right into the game and I appreciate that.

 

[Mr Moose]

It runs like shit mostly as soon as you use the features of 5. The newer versions perform better.

 

[Bojji]

Can someone explain why, unlike most other UE5 games this gen, E33 does not prompt with a 5 minute "shader compilation" screen on PC when you launch it? All the while running better than 99% of UE5 games on the market.

It just goes right into the game and I appreciate that.

Game is caching shaders in loading screens and realtime (async, causing some stutters).

Shader compilation screens are GOOD, that means you don't have shader related stutters in games. Try playing Hellblade 1, game in DX12 mode have ZERO shader precache, same for Battlefield 5. Both games have constant stutter for the first x minutes.

It runs like shit mostly as soon as you use the features of 5. The newer versions perform better.

E33 uses all UE5 features and runs fairly good.

 

[poodaddy]

I despise UE5 's blueprints, for some reason they confuse the shit out of me. I just prefer working directly with code. I just used UE5 in a class with four other dudes and we made a quick game together, only one of the five of us wants to keep using UE5, the rest of us decided to keep working together and we're focusing on Godot moving forward.

 

[Mr Moose]

E33 uses all UE5 features and runs fairly good.

Does it use Lumen? I didn't know that. What's the version that seen a performance increase? 5.5?
Edit: I might've known that and forgot lol, I deleted the game recently to free up some space.