- consolified
- UI atrocious
- max map size normal
- max MP size 5 in the first 2 ages, 8 only if you start in the last age
- last age only goes to 1950 and has a hard end, cant play after that
- English civilization clearly held back for a DLC release (england was always in civ and London was used as an example for why they used the civ-age system and the economic victory screen depicts London
- there is a hard end to every age and you start with a new civilization in the next age (only the personality you picked will be constant)
- look at this AI atrocity that is the economic victory screen:
Not gonna lie, the Fortnite dances being added to the game and shown in advertising material, alongside the $70 pricetag and different pricing tiers was enough to tell me something was up. Apparently you cannot play past the win condition as well.
Yeah the UE5 thing is another kind of related aspect to this. I've had people tell me I'm crazy for this but I can tell almost every single time a game is using UE5, they mostly all look the same to me and it's a lighting thing usually. That engine's way of lighting games is just SO unappealing to me and it's why I can always spot it.
Based from my experience using Unreal Engine 4/5, how the engine is structured makes it really difficult to deviate from a specific kind of pipeline (the photorealistic PBR pipeline), not enough effort is put into the engine's forward rendering mode (even then, now you can't really raise the shadow resolution through cvars or have TAA/FXAA for some reason), Lumen is extremely grainy (and even the hardware RT mode feels like a downgrade from UE4's old raytracing system).
Epic hasn't done much to improve the lightmap system or bring GPU lightmass out of beta (Both of which don't work on the Linux editor). which GPU lightmass would be fine for most linear games (Out of all of the games that I've seen use Lumen, only Fortnite really benefits from it). They now disable static lighting support in the project settings and each map's world settings, meaning that there's even more project settings that need to be changed.
If you want toon shading, without modifying a ton of engine source code and shader code to have a hacky solution for it, and without post-processing (Because it sucks for that), you are stuck with unlit materials and messing around with shader code for distance field shadows to effectively fake shadow casting (this doesn't work with forward rendering either, and Epic patched out the bug that was allowing materials to access shadow information). You probably also need to fake point lights using Blueprints and some clever material parameter and/or render target tricks, but those will lack shadows. Some Epic employees claims that the new Strata Materials system is supposed to work towards allowing this kind of stuff, but at the moment, it's mostly restricted to material layers and such. From what I could gather from the HiFi Rush talk, they're using forward rendering for characters (without shadow casting), and their own engine modifications to effectively hook different stages of the rendering pipeline.
Unreal Engine isn't necessarily a poorly optimized game engine (if you know what you're doing), just that Epic poorly communicates how to use specific features (their C++ documentation has been crap for years), and that results in suboptimal results from developers that aren't willing to spend time fine-tuning and investigating issues. The only big sticklers for Unreal, optimization wise, are the new rendering features, the PSO stuttering, and the asset streaming system having stuttering (Which couldn't be fixed with Returnal).
github.com
bsky.app
www.teamfortress.com
M, CS:S, and HLDM:S), adding 64-bit binary support, a scalable HUD/UI, prediction fixes, and a lot of other improvements!
filepilot.tech
metacouncil.com
www.gematsu.com
