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Gamer PSA: UE5 does not automatically make a game better or worse, it's just a set of tools. The game part still has to be made. End PSA.
It does make them feel homogenous, with similar strengths and limitations both visually and mechanically, though.
I mean I guess if everyone was using the default settings and buying assets off the unreal store you might get that, but the engine doesn't come with graphics. You can make whatever you want in it. You could make a ps1 era looking game. You could make something like windwaker. You could make a 2d game. It's just a set of tools.
Don't get me wrong, the engine does have strengths and weaknesses, and lends itself better to certain things. That makes games of a certain type gravitate towards it.
You can do plenty of lower end stuff and have it feel somewhat distinct, but it takes a lot more to use UE in a 3D game and not make it super obvious it's unreal. People are responding unfavorably to it being on unreal for a reason. It's not imagination. It has a lot of flaws that limit games using it unless they take extraordinary measures to overcome them.
The end result is people tired of unreal because the games all fall short in the same ways, because the engine pushes devs into it.
Is it taking extraordinary measures, or is it more leaning into the hyper realism look because that's what people expect when they hear UE5? Not a rhetorical question, I just would assume the latter.
The extraordinary measures to not feel like another generic UE game involve replacing core components not designed to be replaced.
The reason people don't want to see UE just be "the engine" for every big budget game is because you get way more variety when big companies make their own from the ground up to meet their own needs. A game like Elden Ring feels different because they have different design principles, sure, but it also feels different because they built their own engine from the ground up that fits its gameplay. It would be a worse game in UE. The things it abstracts away sound great, but it means everyone does the same things the same way.
People react negatively to it because it's really easy to tell.
I definitely agree about going back to more bespoke engines.
It's also the camera and lighting. Someone remanded MW2 in Unreal Engine and while it looked better it somehow had a Fortnite feel to it.
True, though it does make the end result better than shittier engines. Like, you could see the "Unity" in Unity games, only a few of them weren't jank. For UE games, generally I found it to be a bunch more stable bug-wise, same for when I developped my own. No idea how Godot fares now, haven't tried the engine since my college days, but back then it was cool.
In Unity you can only remove the start up image if you pay enough. So many small indie titles with little budgets have the start up logo while the bigger productions normally removed them. Before Unity fucked up only a small portion of indies used Unreal so you have to look harder to find that many junk games. I think we will see in the next years a rise on Unreal engine junk games
Yeaaah, but then again not really, there has been an Unreal scene in indies. I'd say it was a 60-30-10 split between Unity, Unreal and Godot (of people using these engines, not counting custom ones). My point is there is a "character" or "personality" of these engines. It stems from both the factors you mentioned, and the tutorials / sample projects that are in Unreal or Unity. Unreal games quite often have specific lighting that immediately makes you go "Unreal" from looking at a game. I can't really explain it, it's like seeing AI photos - sometimes all the fingers, eyes are there but the "uncanny valley" feeling remains. For Unity it always was the "jank" to me, even without seeing any logo and googling afterwards. Probably just confirmation bias on my part, but oh well
Edit: for Unreal another tell is the default "skeleton" animations for a third person character. Some of the cheap asset flips even leave the unreal robot / doll model. It mostly stems from the UE marketplace and people rigging their models with the default skeleton so more anims / custom ones work for it
10% seems rather high for Godot, is it really that popular ?
Doublechecked it, and it's 4% based on steamdb for 2023, and 5% for 2024 That's of course counting only these three.
Steam released 14500 games in 2023 (all engines).
Unreal on steam was 2400
Unity was 7400
Godot 400
Before the Unity suicide, I doubt it had 10% either. And you know, making games takes time, so in terms of released games, we might still not see an uptick.
But I do think newly developed, particularly indie titles will go beyond those 10%, and maybe even quite easily so.
There's not many statistics out there, so here's some horribly biased ones: https://gamefromscratch.com/godot-popularity-at-gmtk-jam-2024-explodes/This is from a gamejam held by a particular YouTube channel. That YouTube channel has an ongoing series about making a Unity game, nothing about Godot yet.
But it is a gamejam, where people sit down for just a weekend to make a game, so people will be much more willing to try a new engine out. Although they'll typically have some prior experience, since you don't want to spend the whole gamejam learning an engine.But yeah, those caveats notwithstanding, that still is a significant growth for Godot.
Definitely feel your pain in unity. I made a game with it and we had so many technical problems. UE has some major issues too though. None of them are perfect. Godot is getting better and better but it's still very far from a mature engine.
Generally makes it worse though. It's an engine built with shortcuts for a 'good' looking game. Obviously developers can skip these shortcuts, but rarely do.