I mean I am almost at the end, it's okay and stuff, however I don't think that custom Engine is worth it for what the game does.
First the game does not look as good as One X version of the previous one, I am comparing it to that one, because that one also ran on 30hz, it's blurrier and I think it overall looked more polished.
Pushing CPU hard, what does it mean? All cores? Single core? I don't have it install on my machine, because I sold 3090 and waiting on 4090, which should be here soon. Why would it push hard CPU when game isn't that interactive (meaning physics when you just walking and even with rats setpieces, everything is just so basic...)
Making rats more like that one by one, is a bitch and I don't really understand how Series are better than PS5, since we know that DirectX has issues with instancing ton of moving interactive parts, was it fixed or something, did I miss the news? I am rocking August GDK (S|X licence included) in work and so far there hasn't been release anything they talked about on that dev conference. But then again it's a mess, as normally MS works are.
From my perspective as sort of software engineer, those swarms of rats would be better done, just by some moving mesh and just 2 or so layers of rats, effect would be the same and demand on HW would be much lower. For those interactive sections, you would just make pools of rats which can move by player interaction and that other "fluff" would be just a non-interactive instance, which would shake, few KB worth of animation data, which would only suck GPU power to draw it.
HOWEVER, I am not claiming to be some sort of genius, I am just an informed dev....who worked at something which had to use ton of tricks to be able to run on Xbone and PS4.
I am not impressed, Asobo did killer job Flight Sim, which is using Forza Tech, which I can't see them being really familiar with it, since they just made Flight Sim on it, probably whole MS behind your ass works wonders.
Edit: Also motion blur is ugly as fuck, not sure what happened but especially in those cutscenes, it sometimes look like an aura around character, it looks ugly. Not sure whats up, per object motion blur was solved in Unreal 3.5, so why are we, more than 10 years from that point struggling to make it like it was done for example in Gears of War 3 or Uncharted 3....