Found this channel, Threat Interactive, some time ago and have been watching the videos. He uses debugging tools to go step by step on how each frame is generated, explaining bottlenecks, things that reduce performance (like computing some stuff more than once, out of order, etc) and things that make the final frame look bad (usually bad anti aliasing)
The dude gets very mad about the state of current games’ pipelines, mainly due to how Unreal and Nvidia have fucked things over for their profit - and really, when we take graphics from today and compare with games from 2016, it’s easy to see downgrades in quality AND performance.
Yeah… unfortunately I’m unsurprised. E33 is undeniably technically messy, even on PC with some mods to fix issues like framerate capped cutscenes, it’s got some attacks that trigger noticeable stutters and the like, even with shaders compiled. And I noticed visual issues like a ton of pop-in travelling the world map.
But like… this is a small team, and my god they had a jawdropping art direction, it’s a gorgeous game. I haven’t watched the video myself (and don’t intend to), but if you wanted to criticize UE for creating an engine that encourages bad habits in smaller projects like this, that would be fine, the issues I ran into undeniably have some “UE5-ness” about them. But if you put it in terms of “this game doesn’t look good/is bad”, you’ve totally lost me. It’s not pushing any technical boundaries, but it’s the most visually striking game I’ve played in ages.
Good art direction always beats out technology. Technology is just there to help the art shine, or to hold it back, but tech alone never defines a game.
Very few game, E33 included, are technological marvels honestly. Most game devs, especially small/indie ones, just want to make the game and not worry about how the engine works internally or how the code in their shaders work or so on.
Some of the more popular PC games still being played today are XNA/MonoGame games ffs.
TI is just an arrogant POS lol.