MrGabr

There was a bug recently fixed in Unity where if your system was already infected, a virus could run any code through Unity, possibly gaining privileges. I felt Unity slightly overstated the severity in their announcement to developers, but when you get an email from Unity saying "we fixed a critical engine vulnerability, update your game ASAP," it can be quite panic-inducing.

AFAIK, the speed increase to allow technology like the volume is the whole pitch. Not every studio has an entire volume, so lower-budget filmmakers can set up a system with a green screen where the cinematographer can see the CGI environment in real-time through the camera, and with the asset store integration, indie filmmakers can have an insane set/backdrop for a tiny fraction of the normal price.

Now that I think of it, though, I think Mr. Verbinski here is placing undue blame on UE5 when Marvel's CGI has been getting worse and worse because they throw an army of slaves at the footage after the fact, rather than paying artists and working with them to set up shots to make the CGI as easy as possible, like he did.

That's fair, and you really see that on games like Norse where they don't have the resources to make custom material and post-processing shaders, but they still want it to look like AAA photorealism (a bad strategy to begin with but that's their problem). Out of the box, though, UE5 still looks leagues better than anything else that isn't proprietary, and I'd argue that if you do have the time/staff to dedicate an entire team to technical art, the ceiling of how good UE5 can look, if you're going for photorealism, is higher than it is for Unity and Godot as well.

To the original context of the post, that ceiling is still way lower than what should be acceptable quality for big-budget movie CGI, but regarding games, I'm gonna stick to my original point and say that's still an issue on the developers' part for not putting in the effort to make it look good. Even accounting for optimization and visual tweaking, they're still saving enormous amounts of time and money by using UE5 instead of their own engine, and that effort should be expected, the lack thereof not excused.

To everyone saying it's a slip backwards for games, too, it's more complicated than that. It's absolutely possible to make a game that runs at more than 90 fps in UE5; I've done it in VR. The engine just makes it super easy to be lazy, and when you combine that with modern AAA "optimization is for suckers" game dev philosophy, that's where you get performance like Borderlands 4.

I think people only notice UE5 games running badly, and don't realize when it's fine. Clair Obscur was in UE5 and I never dropped below 60fps on max settings except in one area. Avowed was in UE5, probably a really early version like 5.2 or 5.3, based on when it released (the latest it could've been is 5.5, but it's bad practice to switch major engine versions too far into development, so I'd doubt they updated even to 5.4). Avowed had bugs for sure, but not performance issues inherent to the engine.

I think blaming UE5 lets lazy development practices off easy. I'll take it over Unity for sure (I've experienced Unity fail at basic vector math, let alone that no one should ever trust them again after that per-install fee stunt). We should be maintaining that same frustration at developers for not optimizing. Lumen was not ready when it came out, and Nanite requires a minimum hardware spec that's still absurd, but it's literally two switches to flip in project settings to turn those off. UE5 is really an incredible piece of technology and it has made, and continues to make, game making accessible on a scale comparable to when Unity added a free license. AAA developers get off easy when you blame the engine instead of their garbage code.

~Godot is a beautiful perfect angel that needs a new 3D physics engine~

To everyone saying it's a slip backwards for games, too, it's more complicated than that. It's absolutely possible to make a game that runs at more than 90 fps in UE5; I've done it in VR. The engine just makes it super easy to be lazy, and when you combine that with modern AAA "optimization is for suckers" game dev philosophy, that's where you get performance like Borderlands 4.

I think people only notice UE5 games running badly, and don't realize when it's fine. Clair Obscur was in UE5 and I never dropped below 60fps on max settings except in one area. Avowed was in UE5, probably a really early version like 5.2 or 5.3, based on when it released (the latest it could've been is 5.5, but it's bad practice to switch major engine versions too far into development, so I'd doubt they updated even to 5.4). Avowed had bugs for sure, but not performance issues inherent to the engine.

I think blaming UE5 lets lazy development practices off easy. I'll take it over Unity for sure (I've experienced Unity fail at basic vector math, let alone that no one should ever trust them again after that per-install fee stunt). We should be maintaining that same frustration at developers for not optimizing. Lumen was not ready when it came out, and Nanite requires a minimum hardware spec that's still absurd, but it's literally two switches to flip in project settings to turn those off. UE5 is really an incredible piece of technology and it has made, and continues to make, game making accessible on a scale comparable to when Unity added a free license. AAA developers get off easy when you blame the engine instead of their garbage code.

~Godot is a beautiful perfect angel that needs a new 3D physics engine~

Boy Boy

Neon White, Cyberhook, and Crumble are all excellent, though you might be looking for a more traditional platformer.

Blue Fire is decent and definitely worth checking out while it's $4 right now.

Regarding social media feeds, I have mixed opinions, because you're right about the echo chamber, but I also am only still on any mainstream platform for the memes, and I only want it to show me memes, which it wouldn't do if not for personalized recommendations.

As for games, I don't want my recommendations to be dominated by whatever has the biggest marketing budget and can take over my feed. I mostly play indie games, and I think if my store page wasn't personalized, I wouldn't see nearly as many small games as I do.

Would you be willing to share why you don't like the "corpo spying"? I personally never understood - an online service has to know your requests in order to serve the results to you, and keeping revords of those requests is the only way to have personalized recommendations, which I would rather have than be served ads for games (or music or whatever) I'll never even consider.

I haven't played Dark Souls specifically, but in Hollow Knight (+Silksong), Elden Ring, Lies of P, and Sekiro, I usually felt like if I really hit a wall, I could just explore another path for a while until I hit a wall there, then repeat until I ended up coming back to the first path, whereupon my stronger abilities gave me the forgiveness I needed to beat the first boss within a few tries.

Sometimes I did hit a wall of a boss with nowhere else to go, and I did have to git gud, but I've found that those tend to be more interesting and fun to learn than side bosses are. But I usually enjoy that process. If you don't, I do feel there's no reason to not get a "give me a gun" option like in Another Crab's Treasure (or mod one in yourself). I never understood people policing the fun of single player games.

^a notable exception to my enjoyment of learning bosses would be that bitchass wizard frog in Silksong from Bilewater he deserved the cheese I used^

VeggieTales is giving them too much credit - there's good moral lessons in there! (And the creator said all the botanically-fruit male veggies are canonically trans??)

ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel off the air for saying Kirk's killer was right-wing and that they're trying to use Kirk's death for political points.