I see a lot of folks trying to blame this on Unreal, but that makes no sense in light of other Unreal games being smooth for the visual fidelity, and Gearbox having worked with Unreal for literally forever.
This is all on Gearbox, and their CEO/devs throwing gas in the fire via Twitter.
It’s honestly insane. There is clearly internal dysfunction at Gearbox, yet their CEO and leads are allowed to damage their brand to their hearts content with… no repercussions? WTF is Embracer (their parent) even doing to miss that?
UE5 by default uses a lot of flashy tech that is supposed to improve performance, but a lot of it only does so in scenarios that are already extremely unoptimized. Using more traditional methods tends to achieve the same fidelity at a fraction of the performance cost. But there’s no time for optimization, and these fancy options “just work”, so there ya go.
The end result is a poorly running blurry mess of a game, but at least it’s out on schedule I guess.
I looked up some videos from YouTube sleuths on why so many UE5 games suck. For any studio previously using UE3 or 4, they had to relearn/recreate nearly their entire workflow again. 5 very much changed damn near everything. But also that 5 has all this tech that everyone assumes works in all scenarios and is a miracle, when in reality it’s still software tech and has very real limitations and best use cases that studios ignore. Larger studios “should” be able to trial and error while burning through $ to figure it out, but usually management doesn’t give them enough time. Smaller studios can’t afford to have many many months of downtime learning to re-adapt everything. It’s just so damn complex that very few have had time and $ to just trial and error figure out its limitations and to work within them.
It SHOULD get better and better as time goes on, though. The tech pieces in 5 keep getting improvements, and theoretically people should eventually start to adapt to it correctly, and the knowledge should spread as devs move to different studios for new work.
Hardly surprising that the sales have been soft since launch considering the shocking user reviews. The game is pretty good, but when it barely runs on most users machines people are going to either keep waiting for it to improve or write it off forever. All the die-hard fans who are even interested in the endgame content already have the game.
Even outside of the performance problems, it’s become clear the pattern is to release the base game which is ok, then eventually release an expansion that makes it feel like a complete experience. A lot of people that started with world or rise are just going to hold off for the expansion
Hes a libertarian nepo baby born into extreme wealth. His dad, the chairman of his company’s board and a main investor, was a cofounder of Inuit, the turbotax/quickbooks company.
I think Nintendo thinks they have so much nostalgia, and loyal customers, that this generation they really said “fuck it” and are twisting the knife to see how much the consumer will tolerate. I’m not going to be surprised if we see price drops and actual sales (not 10 bucks off a 5 year old game like they usually do) by the time holidays role around. I don’t think they are anticipating the pushback that is happening.
Mass Effect the IP isn’t the issue, the issue is EA sucks. So you’re basically asking why do they even persist as a company anymore.
Also I think Andromeda was okay, just terribly buggy at launch. The gameplay was actually pretty fun imo. On the other hand, Veilguard was technically sound but the game itself was not great. So if they can somehow learn lessons from both, there is hope.
Less about EA, more about Bioware. EA has proven they aren’t shy about murdering studios, so why keep Bioware around when their last good game was, what? Star Wars: Old Republic? 2011?
First of all, the original concept of the reapers’ objective was way better than the “AI bad” we got;
secondly, most of its story is just tying loose ends - the whole game is a collection of fanservice moments, many of which look good but feel inorganic(heh) if you think about the fact that one undead human soldier (plus a few dozen subordinates) solves all major galactic disputes.
Not ALL major political conflicts in the galaxy, you didn’t solve one in the first game and only solved one in the second one (with the solution being “RIP, batarians”).
Two was horrible, the end boss skeleton is the stupidest shit. I liked the first, endured the second to the end and never touched the third or Andromeda
2 has very interesting character development and interaction, but I agree that the final boss is a fucking joke, both as a fight and as something within the lore. Those collector praetors were much harder for me to deal with, the fuckers would easily kill off my team and fully restore barrier as soon as I started hitting its actual health
I love 2D platformers. I had no idea this game was anything like that. Absolutely no one has talked about it. All I’ve seen is the character with the logo, and it just looks like a bad knockoff of the old sequels, so…
Maybe they should have advertised it.
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