Sure, and nobody is denying that. But there are breeds that are more aggressive in nature and a lack of training and control of them is far more dangerous.
Huskies have been involved with plenty of attacks on humans in the past. Pitbulls significantly more. I'd ban them all from being available to the general public to be honest.
I have less issue with smaller devs doing it, for reasons you mentioned. Sometimes their creative idea is best getting out there on any engine than it not getting out at all. We just need to stop normalising the use of Unreal Engine, before it is too late. Balatro is a good example we should be highlighting instead of something like Expedition 33 (which I am not saying shouldn't have released at all, we just shouldnt be praising it for it's use of UE, but rather for it's other features/standouts, like as you mentioned).
I have yet to see a well made Unreal Engine 5 game, but every studio is seemingly jumping to it. It's become like a buzzword almost (you never used to hear about the engine much, but now it's all "yeah our game is on Unreal Engine 5!!!"). But for some, me included, it's like putting a "rotten" sticker on a box of food. I just want to see more devs try other options, so we don't stagnate and allow Epic full control over the industry essentially. We used to get lots of custom built engines, but we have been slowly consolidating over the last decade, which I know at the root of it, is down to good ol' capitalism. It just sucks for games and by extension, the consumers, us.
You are right thats what it would be called, but it doesnt do anything to be a "spiritual successor". It's just a modern copy of it, even worse in places, definitely in terms of quality. I wouldnt be surprised if the assets are just from a marketplace. I left some more thoughts elsewhere in the comment thread and they certainly love their "modern technologies", with AI generated art ingame.
The game is incredibly poorly made, with clipping textures and models everywhere, animations are horrible, performance is terrible, it's hazy and blurry, there's AI imagery all over the place.
It's a cash grab at best. You just have to spawn into the lobby to immediately know you just bought an incredibly low quality game.
Cool, but it's also ruining games by "pioneering" shit technologies, such as temporal AA, making every game look like a blurry mess.
It's also a bad thing to have everyone using one engine, especially UE given how Epic likes to exert it's control over developers through it.
We should stop endorsing it, instead we should highlight and praise devs using alternate engines.
Engines like Unity and Unreal have been great, offered indie devs an easy way to create some fantastic games, but we should push smaller devs to try engines like Godot now for that as Unity and UE got too big for their boots.
Just posturing, the pound wouldnt be ditched if the UK rejoined EU. I dont get why people get so caught up over this. It's like a "ha ha" from the diehard EU supporters, which is kind of pointless.
They think the UK are gagging to rejoin the union, when they are not. They also seem to think the UK rejoining does nothing to benefit the union states, very weird.
Sure, and nobody is denying that. But there are breeds that are more aggressive in nature and a lack of training and control of them is far more dangerous.