I was planning on picking up B4 when the GOTY edition goes on sale for $20-30 couple years from now. I figured performance issues will be solved by then. Now I think I’ll pass.
That’s just the inherent cost of going with general purpose engines. They’ll always perform worse than specialized tech, but modern games are so complicated that custom engines aren’t really feasible anymore.
Unreal is the king of bloat. Rather than “general purpose” they strove for “all purpose” - Unreal Engine tries to do literally everything out of the box with as many bells and whistles attached as possible. The result is that Unreal Engine games require tons of optimization to run well, and even the editor itself consumes tens of gigabytes and runs like crap.
Unity is simply a mess of poor decisions and technical debt. Their devs seem to reinvent a crucial development pipeline every few years, give up halfway, then leave both options exposed and expect developers to just automatically know the pitfalls of each. Combined with horrific mismanagement and hostile revenue-seeking, Unity has lost a ton of goodwill over the past few years. It’s a major fall from grace for what was once the undisputed king of Indie dev engines.
Godot is tiny, decently performant, and great for simple games, but it’s very bare-bones and expects developers to implement their own systems for anything beyond basic rendering, physics, and netcode. Additionally, the core developers have a reputation for being incredibly resistant to making major changes even when a battle-tested pull request for a frequently requested feature is available. Still my personal pick though.
That’s just the inherent cost of going with general purpose engines.
Some studios are able to use these major engines very well, others not so much. It seems like there is a level of expertise needed to make well-oiled games.
On the contrary, custom engines have been bombing.
Look at Starfield or Cyberpunk 2077 or basically any custom engine AAA. Look at what happened to things like ME Andromeda.
…Then look at KCD2. It looks freaking fantastic, looks like raytacing with no raytracing, runs like butter, and it’s Crytek.
Look at something like Satisfactory, rendering tons of stuff on a shoestring budged and still looking fantastic thanks to Unreal Lumen.
There’s a reason the next Cyberpunk is going to be Unreal, and its because building a custom engine just for your game is too big an undertaking. Best to put that same budget in optimizing a ‘communal’ engine, polish, bugfixing and such.
Borderlands 4 is slow because the botched optimization, not because its Unreal.
Hot take, Borderlands was never really a good franchise. Yeah I played through the second game, but i did so once, and never wanted to return to it afterwards.
there was something special about playing through 1 for the first time knowing nothing about what to expect. Then when 2 came out I liked it alright but already felt like it was a big tonal departure. funny to see the discussion shift over time to 2 being the benchmark and 3(+) going too far.
Well to me, borderlands 2 was the most fun I’ve had with a shooter since half-life 2 or CoD4. It’s one of the funniest games I’ve ever played as well. I think the writing in general is really top notch (props to Anthony Birch), the characters are memorable, the weapons and abilities are fun. All and all, BL2 really hit the mark in a lot of ways for me.
Borderlands 3 on the other hand, just wasn’t as good. It had a ton of great quality of life improvements, so that was nice. The player abilities were also largely really good, I liked most of the classes. But it had a ton of weaknesses… The level design was pretty awful, the much bigger maps really spread out the action absolutely killed the pacing. The story was pretty dumb, and while the villains were detestable, it was only in the way that all obnoxious teenagers are detestable. And the greatest sin, the loot was a mess. They actually threw way too many guns at you, so many that you never really get a chance to enjoy any of them. And way too many of them were uniques (with mysterious effects they never bother to explain).
Honestly that was how I felt as well. I remember being hyped the play bl2 and then getting bored doing meaningless quests over and over. Like am I supposed to feel anything for these people asking me to retrieve parts over and over? At least do some sort of quest where they can shoot people. I thought the combat system was better but I wasn’t compelled to play through it
That one is a gem, Gearbox can’t compete with this. B2’s only biggest asset is the voice actor, the animation when two character interact is worst than Oblivion.
There aren’t that many Premium™ Gamers®, and trying to pretend that that is, like, a legitimate target demographic to pander to is just sad, folks.
(The funniest gamer influencer backlash I’ve seen lately was against some YouTuber who blew ~$2K on gaming desk and a chair and called it a “minimalist” setup. People at large rightfully went “are you shitting me”.)
From my experience graphics doesn’t matter much in VR if FPS is fine. You can play HL Alyx on a what was sometime ago affordable gpu and get almost the same experience as with 5900.
You made this statement by using the most optimized high end VR title in existence. And the creators of the game their own engine!
Graphics do matter. That’s why you cited Alyx. Right? Because the game is impressive in many ways, graphics being a really big one. Graphics in VR have generally stagnated for the past 5 years since Alyx came out.
Graphics are why the interactions with bottles in that game are so impressive. Just to highlight one small thing.
You have a good point about Alyx. My opinion using VR is that there’s a point with graphics when it feels comfortable, any better doesn’t give much to the experience like if you see pixels your brain just thinks that’s how the world is. I don’t include objects being interactive into graphics here, but what people generally perceive as graphics ie textures, lighting and other stuff you need gpu for. Also there are very few such interactive objects in beat saber or superhot though you still feel being in vr.
Anyone who bought this game, is a moron. No ifs, no ands, no buts. Randy is a fucking prick, and made no secret of his feelings towards gamers right before the game came out. No one should have spent a single penny on this dogshit.
Unfortunately it doesn’t matter what any of us say…the damage is done. I saw something like 200k online on steam. Unless most of them refund the negative reviews are meaningless. Pretend it was only 200k on steam and they bought just the “shitty” $70 version. …who knows how many bought on other platforms as well. They made a lot of money already is all I’m saying and I wish they didn’t. Games junk.
It’s more akin to trying to drive a semi truck with a semi truck motor but then something drops and there’s a ton of friction like an unintentional tractor pull. Even the best chips on the market display subpar performance.
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Aktywne