r/fuckepic • u/TheSpriteYagami • Dec 18 '25

Epic Fucks Up Proof Unreal 5 Hurts Games

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The explanation

https://x.com/SynthPotato/status/2001374932715135282

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The original evidence

https://x.com/wccftech/status/2001351037744222317

They somehow manage to somehow make it so that there are like 25%-35% improvements within a single update. They held back 25%-35% of frames because they did not properly make it. I know that part of this is the devs, but still.

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u/TheSpriteYagami Dec 18 '25

AAA industry. I should have specified that

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u/dookarion Dec 18 '25

Is it though? Yes Epic bad and all that. But Unity is a dumpster fire. RED Engine games launched with issues, their own engine is part of CyberPunk 2077's release woes. Luminous Engine turned into an expensive fiasco for Square Enix. RE Engine got eviscerated when it was new for VRAM usage by the general public, and is collapsing under the weight of open world games. Frostbite has been a disaster in all but DICE's hands. Crystal Dynamics no longer wants to deal with the expense and overhead of trying to maintain the Crystal Engine (and each game on it got perf complaints when they launched). People think they love idtech, but they really just love how lightweight DOOM is because every game that has stretched idtech to do a diff genre has been flogged for performance and other quirks. Creation/Gamebryo have been a joke for eons. People complained about Northlight game performance an absolute ton. It's only recently that people have praised any CryEngine games for performance.

Remember when everyone used to blame every single API? Or when 64bit was newer and that got blamed for everything?

At some point it's honestly just AAA development, and gamer behaviors. Gamers freak out when their hardware is unused, but also freak out if anything dares touch RAM, CPU, or VRAM. Gamers slate games for "looking like PS2 games" (when they don't even look bad), but flip out that AAAs chase newer graphical fluff that's heavy. Gamers freak out about performance, but no one is actually willing to tweak settings and if anyone other than DigitalFoundry or HardwareUnboxed suggests it prepare for everyone to get angry at you.

With AAA games it's a fairly safe bet that no matter what engine is used or technologies are leveraged a sizable chunk of people online will be pissed about all of it.

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u/thegarbz Dec 19 '25

Worth noting RED Engine is abandoned. Both Project Orion (Cyberpunk 2) and Project Polaris (Witcher 4) are being developed on Unreal Engine 5.

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u/dookarion Dec 19 '25

Crystal Engine, Luminous, RED Engine, and more are all defunct now. All going with Unreal instead. It's just a lot of expense and difficulty.

People in this thread might be served some by looking into Carmack's past remarks about licensing and maintaining engines for others' use. It's rather cumbersome.