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.

Yeah, personally played it on a 7900XTX (ew, Nvidia /s), on both Windows and Linux. They also have console versions, so definitely not vendor locked!

I’d 100% agree with you if it was though, a totally vendor-locked game would be really gross.

I enjoyed Threat Interactive for a while, really in-depth content, but I found him so angry and so constantly negative that I found it overbearing. Realized I just wasn’t having fun with his content anymore, the doom and gloom was just excessive.

Also, I don’t think things are all bad. Yes there’s a metric ton of BS, and stuff like ghosting isn’t a delightful new problem. But a lot of the new tech is interesting, once the technology matures and sheds some of the excessive performance costs that required these compromises.

Let me give an example. DOOM TDA took a lot of flak for requiring raytracing, and indeed performance is a lot slower than Eternal, but it actually runs pretty well on a broad spread of hardware and looks fantastic. Also, the game’s destruction feels fantastic, it’s badass to see your gunfire shredding small buildings, it adds a lot, and it would be impossible to light dynamic geometry and physics like that without RT. I want to see that kind of destruction brought to a ton of games, but I don’t want to go back to the flat lighting of the early 3D era either. RT does both, so I want to see where that technology can go, even if it means we’ll get a bunch of games with so-so implementations and compromises while the industry figures it out.

It’s also just… cool. Sue me, I’m into tech, I want to see a game run at 20FPS with high resolution path tracing even if that’s far from practical and probably not the best use of dev resources lol.

Note: this isn’t about a VR implementation, it’s just the 2D version ported to ARM. If you play it on Steam Frame, it still just projects onto a virtual 2D screen, it just runs natively without lepton. You can now run the game much faster on a raspberry pi as well.