Unreal Engine; The Game Development Monopoly

I want to preface something by saying that Unreal Engine has an amazing legacy. People still don’t remember just how a single game development engine from 1995 went through multiple changes and evolutions.

It was first a software based 3D rendering software before transitioning to hardware based, and the majority of the games in the 2000s shaped the industry themselves from Bioshock, Ghost Recon, Deus Ex: Invincible War, and so on. But Unreal Engine 3 is where the biggest impact was made. Even in older generation consoles, and PC gaming at the time, the visuals were nothing to scoff at.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was a technical marvel, compared to its 2nd iteration, the number of games ballooned. From its lighting tech, early global illumination, high texture detailing to being the first engine to adopt multithreading workloads of the CPU. I grew up playing games based around them, and it was understandable that a company like Epic Games would continue changing the software game with its 4th and 5th iteration. The problem however gets worse, instead of praise, people are venting out frustrations. Streamline and conquer, the Unreal Engine 5 is kind of ruining games now, what are we to do?

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For its timeline from inception till today, Unreal Engine has always been a C++ programming based engine. Nowadays, you can easily use it like you’ve used map editors in other games, but it is very multi-layered. Every facet of its features need some level of program editing, debugging, and testing to check the final product and when you have an engine that is pushing for ambitious concepts, it can be a little bloated at times.

What do I mean by this? So many triple A developers want to use these features, such as Nanite and Lumen. But again, these are high concept features, that’ll require the end product users to own highly expensive PC hardware to get them running, and even then, there are times they won’t be enough.

The excuse to alleviate these problems involve the use of upscaling software that uses A.I. to cut some visual clarity for extra frames with small, incremental differences, and frame generation tech latency and screen rendering issues notwithstanding. But that’s not the only reason, people are now abandoning their own proprietary engine in using something like Unreal Engine instead. So what seems to be the issue? Why are people are caught in sharing their grievances with it?

I played a game called Cronos: New Dawn, and the trailers for it maybe did a little disservice than usual. Instead of giving the players more to see from teasers and reveal trailers, at least some attempt of alluring players by creating interest in the game’s world, you get segments of more prominent aspects of the game engine.

This is actually the case with a lot of games these days, because UE5 can create photo-realistic visuals with some of the best lighting seen in the industry. Easy to market by glazing its visual fidelity. So, the end result? Stuttering, performance issues, horrible optimizations, unreliable shader compilation, crashes, and the list goes on. When I was playing Cronos, it was infuriatingly jarring and broke my immersion with long and sudden traversal stutters, and the same with Bloober’s prior game, Silent Hill 2.

This is becoming the case for a lot of games right now, save a few because they’ve actually put extra development time and manpower to get them running well. Of course, I can also reference that Capcom with their RE engine has fumbled terribly with Monster Hunter: Wilds, but I’ll digress. There are also cases regarding the main aforementioned features where documentation to fully optimize for their uses are somewhat missing. Leaving one to guess that Epic Games provides special treatment to certain developers if they’re willing to add incentive.

There’s no point contesting it, as it as gained so much market share all throughout, and is pretty much the default choice everybody jumps to outside of Godot, Unity, CryEngine, and so on. The business in selling game engines was never seen very lucrative, but having this kind of control shows you that creative experimentation is somehow being deterred as almost every game just looks super similar to each other.

You don’t simply use a game engine to make pleasing aesthetics, certain games need to be co-developed on other aspects like sound, enemy A.I., certain dynamic systems that affect the gameplay, and they’re being so dumb down due to strenuous development process. Stalker 2 released last year didn’t fare well thanks to basic A.I. design that is seen as a downgrade. This is taking advantage by removing the proprietary made by in-house talent, which suits their overall goal instead of just being “easy to work with”. And that’s just the whole other list of issues, with the performance, technical problems being right on the tip of this iceberg.

This is an industry-wide problem, everybody’s too complacent on releasing broken games now and getting away with it. But for now, the majority of them are from this engine, and piling up more is making gamers lose more faith in their purchased product and when you make games that don’t run well, who’s going to bother upgrading their computers to begin with?

Hardware sales have slowly been plummeting, and that can be the result of so many factors, but it’s a pretty big issue when you can’t run your games after purchasing expensive hardware that is already priced gouged above the MSRP. Not even your fancy FPS generating features can save these cumbersome issues, including the ones happening due to Microsoft’s flimsy implementation of their Windows updates.

Any of these could be a result of just the gaming industry facing a crisis, where after the bubble started to pop since last year with failed releases, it’s leaving companies to just cut jobs left and right, especially the lead designers and those optimizing the technical aspects to make sure end products runs fine. I refuse to budge from my stance, I haven’t purchased that many games the past year and outside of indies, this will not change unless these developers get their bearings together. That includes Epic Games, add more documentation about your features, you’re content to fight giants like Apple, but not update your store and make a better engine? You think Gearbox Software should be alone to blame for Borderlands 4 horrible release state?

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