I hate what Unreal has done to modern triple A artstyles - Tim Sweeney is an enemy of Christ

[The Noise]

It seems like if you are a game developer of sufficient size in $CURRENT_YEAR, you have two choices for game engine:

• If you want to make generic mobile phone crapware or make a shitty remaster of something your company did 25 years ago, use Unity.
• For literally everything else, use Unreal Engine.

I don't know what it is about Unreal Engine specifically, because great games that perform well have been made with it (Fortnite, Deep Rock Galactic, etc.) But it seems like a lot, like a LOT of modern shitware is made with it.

Here's a current example from the trailer for the new halo thingie:

"This will be Halo graphics in 2014"-ass composition.

Like yeah it looks all cool and photorealistic and whatever the fuck but what was gained in individually texturing every particle of sand was lost in overall cohesion. It's impressive but contextually it's tone deaf.

A lot of remasters and triple A games follow this philosophy now and my theory is because middleware engines like Unreal create a lot of pressure that's hard to push back against. When the original Bungie guys were banging rocks together to create the Blam! Engine, they had fine-grained, domain-specific control over literally everything. They could individually tune everything down to the shading of Master Chief's bulging Spartan testicles because they had not only purpose-built their own graphics pipeline, but knew it inside and out as a result. They could make it look however they wanted and it's one of the reasons Halo CE's artstyle is so iconic and striking.


When you switch to an engine like Unreal, you're suddenly dealing with a rendering pipeline that is opinionated and biased towards rendering pretty photorealistic tech demos. This means that if you want to have an equally heavily opinionated artstyle like the one in the original CE, you have to do a lot of fighting with the engine, and if you're an Indian contractor hired by 343 to replace the 90% of the workforce they laid off last year it's easier to just play into the natural biased of the engine (weirdly chrome everything, overly damp surfaces, harsh contrast, etc.) Again, it makes for pretty screenshots but it homogenizes the shit out of everything.

Compare to another UE5 game, Borderlands 4. All of the Borderlands games have this distinct comic-book cel shading normally but you can still see the UE5 worms setting in:

Seriously, what is it with unreal and this bizarrely harsh lighting? This is supposed to be mid-day and yet every single shadow is as harsh as possible. Why the fuck are the patches of grass casting harsh blotchy shadows? It's also unoptimized to shit because of fucking course it is. I saw one reviewer with a 1440p monitor with a 5090 who was locked to 60FPS with DLSS enabled.

I could post more but you get the idea. It's like the artstyle of triple A games is cursed to be this ultra-realism shit that also runs like shit because nobody bothers optimizing anything on Unreal. It's depressing.

Thank you for reading this far and not immediately quoting the part where I implied Fortnite is a good game.

 

[Soggy Floppa]

https://quixel.com/megascans/

Take a gander, see if you recognize anything, its eye opening

 

[31 Black]

It all just looks...busy. I had the same problem when playing Halo CE Anniversary on the new graphics; the extra details drowned out crucial game elements that were easily visible in the original game (enemy color/silhouttes standing out, knowing what level geometry that you and the enemy can and can't see each other through, etc.)

Halo 5 had a similar problem where everything was detailed, but some levels were just gray while the enemies were gray and their weapon projectiles were all orange; I played on mute once as so not to disturb my ex, and I had no idea what was happening.

 

[Breadbassket]

The age of UE being in everything makes me appreciate whatever games are still using perhaps janky or quirky in-house engines. Unreal isn't bad per say it's just that it often isn't used to its greatest extent and a lot of things look graphically homogenized so they have a high potential of blending together.

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

They fucked up Halo's art style LONG before the move to Unreal Engine. Even Halo 2 was a departure and by Halo 3, the unique aesthetic had been completely lost.

 

[Ghost of Wesley Willis]

If you got some time to spare, I'd highly recommend checking out Threat Interactive on YouTube, as he has made countless videos going over everything wrong with Unreal Engine 5 and the modern approaches to graphics.

 

[Jay2U]

It looks better than the Halo Infinite shitshow that looked like it was a dream in a plastic/playdough world.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

What about using the way of Mario 64 for new vidya? Low poly models, low resolution texture maps, those billboard sprites for trees...

 

[Day of the Cope]

I don't think Unreal Engine 5 has anything to do with the abandoned Forerunners buildings looking like they are polished weekly instead of being, you know, fucking abandoned for god knows how long.

 

[PointOfNoReturnPoint]

The age of UE being in everything makes me appreciate whatever games are still using perhaps janky or quirky in-house engines. Unreal isn't bad per say it's just that it often isn't used to its greatest extent and a lot of things look graphically homogenized so they have a high potential of blending together.

If you put someone who is from this day and age into the era of the Build engine and doom 2, they would not even comprehend it. Build engine would kill you with a door and doom 2 had technically not 3d verticality that would make no sense at first. NGL, kinda miss that janky charm sometimes.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Thank you for reading this far and not immediately quoting the part where I implied Fortnite is a good game.

You got me OP.

I don't mind people using engines tbh. It was a common thing back in the day as well, and the days of a solo dev making a game in assembly are long gone.

For me, one of the more damning things about the UE5 art style is the difficulty in creating feminine female models. Some no-name devs have complained about this, but if it's true or just clickbait pandering I don't know.

 

[FILTH Tourist]

The age of UE being in everything makes me appreciate whatever games are still using perhaps janky or quirky in-house engines. Unreal isn't bad per say it's just that it often isn't used to its greatest extent and a lot of things look graphically homogenized so they have a high potential of blending together.

It's more of an asset store problem than an unreal engine one. If devs are making their own assets then the game still looks unique, a big problem is that Epic will make some asset packs free every month, so developers are way more likely to draw upon the same we'll leading to the same look. Abiotic Factor and Voices of the Void are unreal games, but they make their own assets and have their own style.

For me, one of the more damning things about the UE5 art style is the difficulty in creating feminine female models. Some no-name devs have complained about this, but if it's true or just clickbait pandering I don't know.

Difficulty how? Like no built in jiggle physics?

 

[Raging Capybara]

I saw one reviewer with a 1440p monitor with a 5090 who was locked to 60FPS with DLSS enabled.

I despise UE5 like any other sane human being, but that's total bullshit.

Just turn everything down to low. It's goddanm UE5 motherfruckers, the game will look exactly the same regardless of the settings. I tested it on very high, and everything is still a smearing, noisy mess.

I get high triple digits frame rate just fine with an old ass garbo AMD gpu. These games will never look good, there're no compromises, just crank everything to the very low and be happy.

 

[Hakase Shinonome]

What about using the way of Mario 64 for new vidya? Low poly models, low resolution texture maps, those billboard sprites for trees...

Then you get tranny indie slop.

 

[Homocull]

UE5 is phasing out traditional lighting techniques that favored performance that were used in UE4 (like lightmaps) in favor of real-time methods that use raytracing. They are still accessible but they just do not care about these 'old-fashioned' methods and you have to jump through hoops if you don't want to use the new crappy looking raytracing shit, assuming it's not outright broken. Yes this is likely why all modern UE games just look the same, you're not pressured into taking good care of the lighting yourself with manual bakes, just let the realtime shit take care of it.

This means that if you want to have an equally heavily opinionated artstyle like the one in the original CE, you have to do a lot of fighting with the engine, and if you're an Indian contractor hired by 343 to replace the 90% of the workforce they laid off last year it's easier to just play into the natural biased of the engine (weirdly chrome everything, overly damp surfaces, harsh contrast, etc.) Again, it makes for pretty screenshots but it homogenizes the shit out of everything.

This is the part that matters. Pooja genuinely think this shit looks tuff and UE5 is so amazing it let him achieve this with only a few clicks on some checkboxes.

If you have a specific style in mind you absolutely can do it in UE regardless if it's 5 or 4, and any wrestling with the engine is definitely going to take less time than just doing everything yourself. However if your style doesn't require high cost techniques like global illumination it's better to just pivot to another engine (or your own) because it'll run better, unless you need Unreal Engine's workflow which admittedly has more fleshed out tools compared to the others.

Obligatory laugh at UE5 content:

Spoiler

Shitty Nanite foliage pop-in (trees)

0:06

Completely unshaded foliage in the distance due to a near exclusive overreliance on realtime Lumen instead of just baking lighting


Incredibly obvious ghosting, now a staple of the engine thanks to every single photorealistic techniques "needing" TAA spam

0:03

0:03

Whatever the fuck this is

 

[Coolio55]

The new UI also looks like shit. Why'd they move everything around?
Why does the health-bar take up a 6th of the screen height? Why do grenades need their own little corner instead of putting them next to the rest of the ammo?
Why is it all so hard to see against the actual gameplay?

 

[PetiteFeet]

I much prefer stylised games over "high fidelity" games. There comes a point where the fidelity approaches uncanny valley and I feel that way about UE5 games like the Oblivion remake/remaster/whatever the fuck you want to call that homunculus.
Oblivion 2025 should have went either balls deep with the fidelity, or kept the art style of the original 100%. I hate this weird middleground where the NPCs and player character all attempt to look like original Oblivion characters with their goofy faces but everything else looks almost like real life.
Then we have other high fidelity games, like LA Noire or Death Stranding where the characters are all modeled after real human beings and there's face tracking and real acting involved but because the art style can't be realistic enough, it doesn't veer into uncanny valley for me.

Honestly, modern gaming isn't for me. I'm not gonna go into a tirade about politics and DEI/woke games, I'll just simply state that the majority of AAA devs aren't making games aimed at my interests or my taste. Thank fuck for emulation, since Soyny, Microshaft and Nintendon't hates their legacy platforms and massive libraries of games I haven't played yet.
I will make an exception for titles like Silksong - admittedly, it's still an indie game and indie company even if their first game became an instant classic. Team Cherry clearly cares about the game they made and they kept an unspoken promise to their playerbase by marking it at 20 dollars on release. Kudos.

For me, one of the more damning things about the UE5 art style is the difficulty in creating feminine female models. Some no-name devs have complained about this, but if it's true or just clickbait pandering I don't know.

Honestly, I don't think it's a UE5 issue and more a dev problem. I just said I promised not to go into a political or DEI tirade, but you know that's why we can't have pretty women anymore.
Then take a look at Marvel Rivals, yes its an overwatch clone but the art style at least attempts to have sexy, powerful women that aren't hambeasts or men in wigs. Except for Emma Frost, she's kinda mannish.

 

[Idiotron]

It's standardization.
Before gaming went truly mainstream during the PS1 era, you used to have people experimenting with weird shit, often making their own little clunky engines.
Sometimes, they would create new genres in the process.
Most would be bad but it was still interesting to say the least.

Now, 99% of games are like 4-5 different templates made in the same engine.
It's mediocre and that's worse than bad because you forget about it the moment you stop playing it.
It's so standardized that in a few years, they will make AI that will be able to make a generic TPS/FPS after a few prompts.
Sad but that's what you get when something becomes a big business.

 

[Soggy Floppa]

If you got some time to spare, I'd highly recommend checking out Threat Interactive on YouTube, as he has made countless videos going over everything wrong with Unreal Engine 5 and the modern approaches to graphics.

This guy is a lolcow who doesn't have much of a clue what he's actually talking about. I'd write a thread on his antics but I'm too lazy

that were used in UE4 (like lightmaps)

Nanite does not support baked lighting in any capacity due to how it renders differently from regular geometry and doesnt support a UV2 that lightmaps would require. VSM and Lumen are basically required if you want to use it. UE4 already barely supported baked lighting with them pushing dynamic shadows for everything instead.

 

[Otis Mallebrok]

Nothing about the looks of the halo thingie is caused by the unreal engine. You can make a game look like anything you want, using the unreal engine. Its all about art direction.