That’s nice, he is kind enough to tell us that we should not buy his game if we do not have a monster gpu. He is only excluding a very small portion of gamers after all !
I’m still not convinced the engine is the problem. Maybe it’s not helping, sure, but heavy reliance on upscalers to achieve nominal performance is probably a bigger issue.
That, and shipping before proper optimization passes is probably more profitable in the short term, so publishers will push for that.
Yes, the engine could be used well, but it's used for it's out of the box "good" graphics, lighting and such. Which then yes, devs slap on shitty DLSS, frame generation or whatever at the end to reach a somewhat playable framerate (or "framerate number" should I say with the way things are going. Fuck you Nvidia).
No developers are going to spend ages tweaking the engine to get good performance when people will just buy the game regardless. I've yet to see a good performing UE5 game with good fidelity and I probably never will because it's entirely reliant on TAA as it's deferred rendering as standard. I hate seeing developers abandoning their own in-house engines just to swap to shitty UE5. I know, I know, it's all about the money...
The engine is a plague, as every developer is seemingly moving to it. Chasing "upgraded" graphics that no one asked for. All games consolidating onto one engine is very bad.
It's good for movies, bad for games. Give us good raster performance back, no TAA, no upscaling, no frame gen.
I partly agree with you in that everyone using the same UE5 engine is bad
But I really don’t agree that deferred rendering techniques are inherently bad. Maybe they cause negative incentives for developers that lead to worse games in the long run, but you might as well blame capitalism at that point
I like techniques such as TAA because they do work better as anti-aliasing in my experience. I’ve multiple times had the choice between TAA and traditional AA and I think TAA simply does what it sets out to do better. Upscaling and frame generation are also nice to haves as optional features people can enable. Sometimes I use them, sometimes not. But it is bad that companies use these techniques as a crutch, indeed, but I don’t want to see them gone
I really dont mind solutions like upscaling, but it should be for people with older hardware, so they can run newer games better.
Instead it is used as a crutch by developers to gain some "performance" out of their poorly made game (Not blaming devs individually here, they are all probably overworked on titles like this and they wont have much of a say in what tools or timeframe they have). You are right, it's a capitalism issue too.
TAA just looks like I have grease smeared over my monitor... the only acceptable AA for deferred rendering is SMAA honestly, but I still think it's a misused technique in most cases, I have only seen a few games look good with it. Games with it usually have lots of visual flaws, that they hope TAA smears over. But then you just get a blurry game.
I’m becoming more and more convinced it is the engine honestly. It is probably harder to optimize and devs not having enough time to do so if I had to guess.
UE5 can run well, but all the defaults that Epic suggests devs use are really quite bad for performance. They improve performance on horribly unoptimized scenes, but actually optimizing the scene would allow a 10x performance improvement at no reduction in visual fidelity. But devs don’t tend to optimize much anymore because those Epic-suggested defaults “take care of optimization”.
It’s mostly not UE5 exactly. UE5 just let’s devs turn on features that are performance hogs easily. Squad, for example, just upgraded from UE4 to UE5 but they took their time and did things in a smart way (like not using Lumen), and performance increased for a lot of people, with much higher detail too.
UE5 isn’t the issue. It’s devs who turn on all the features they can and ignore optimization because “the engine just handles it.” It’s got some really impressive technology, but it’ll ruin your game if you let it.
What? Some systems have worse performance, primarily if you don’t have enough VRAM, but artifacting and blur? What do you mean? Sure, there’s blur with TAA/FSR/DLSS, but that’s always true and cam be toggled.
You cant toggle it, or you get loads of shimmering, you cant use it because you get loads of blur. There's ghosting even without AA. This is the exact problem, there's no good implementation if you are relying on TAA and/or DLSS as anti-aliasing. Squad suffers it, the same as any UE5 game.
I guess I will stick to my “non-premium” games made by devs who actually care about providing experiences worth experiencing, instead of a checklist-driven, committee designed and overpriced games that are most AAA games.
I sunk 90 hours into Silksong since launch, and now I’m going through Nine Sols and playing PoE2 on and off. I won’t lie I’m hearing good things about BL4 minus the performance, but I’m not giving Randy a single cent and I’m far happier not engaging in AAA dogshit.
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.
“We don’t want to put resources towards optimising our product. We don’t care if the methods we built our product with make it more difficult to use, while regressing in several key visual aspects. The burdon of our shortcomings will be placed on the end user, who will have to spend their resources to out-power them.”
Because the previous ones were great and this one has glowing critics reviews. For me though, the system requirements are too high, so I’ll buy and play it sometime after a PC upgrade.
BL3 was just as much (if not more) of a mess - people shouldn’t be surprised, especially with Randy telling people they should be selling their souls to have the privilege of playing this game.
I played through BL3 on a 2016 PC and it was OK. Not perfect, but perfectly playable. Looking at that PC Gamer article, I don’t even understand the complaint of being unable to run the game at 120 FPS. Seems like an unreasonably high bar. I’d take 60.
If you asked me to recall the story of any of the games, I’d not be able to. I don’t think people play the games for the story. It’s just a fun looter shooter, especially in co-op, which is how I played BL3 around its Epic launch. Revisiting my technical review of the game from then, yeah, you’re right, and I documented various reports of issues, though there were quick fixes deployed or workarounds available for the biggest issues. That seems commonplace in the industry though.
Same as games like the Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk, fans playing it in release year vs 2025 are gonna have completely different experiences. And BL 3 release was also messy, albeit not as bad as this. I was there.
I mostly agree. I’d say they went uphill though, but so did every other game, but even faster. Each game improved some things, but the competition improved much more. They’ve been coasting off of name recognition ever since the first game.
I’m going to have to try to remember that everyone has different taste… But good God I can’t be the only one who despised the dialog and “so randumb holds up spork!?11!” type humor in BL2?
It seems like everyone else loves it. I just found it incredibly grating.
in 3 years PC build guides are gonna be like "You need 3 drives in your gaming PC. One for the OS (this can be small, its not important), at least 2TB for games, and another 1TB for the shaders for those games. Oh and you'll need a top of the line Nvidia card because even a dumb UE5 asset dump game like Notary Simulator won't run on a budget card"
From the reviews I’ve seen, it actually seems like they listened to complaints about three and have toned down the cringey dialogue.
Of course, nobody can get the damn thing to run, so hard to independently verify, but it seems like this entry was meant to be a triumphant return to form, far closer to BL2 in tone and style than BL3.
It’ll maybe be worth checking out once the inevitable Game of the Year edition goes on heavy discount in like four years.
The story is really good so far have beaten 1/3 guys to get the things (trying to not spoil for those who know nothing). I have been having a blast. Only crashed after a hotfix then a second one came out and fixed it as far as I can tell.
The specs required make no sense though it doesn’t look that much better than 3.
pcgamer.com
Najnowsze