Deep Worlds
Unreal Engine is everywhere these days, with even big companies moving from their proprietary engines to Epic’s, like CDPR did with The Witcher 4.
This, however, doesn’t mean that players are happy about it. Many blame Unreal Engine for the many optimization issues they experience in games like Mafia: The Old Country, for example. But is it really UE’s fault?
Eric “Aheyrs” Rajot, the director of the upcoming indie shooter Beautiful Light, doesn’t think so. In his recent X/Twitter post, he claimed that “bad performance is mostly the result of bad development practices rather than an engine flaw” and mentioned The Finals, Marvel Rivals, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Fortnite, and ARC Raiders as examples of well-optimized games on UE.
Deep Worlds
Replying to a tweet by Synth Potato, who is “sick and tired of Unreal Engine 5 games running like crap,” Rajot said he’s “personally so sick and tired [of] game influencer cringe who share misinformed (or ragebait?) [thoughts] for click on Twitter.”
He believes Epic Games is doing a lot to provide excellent optimization and documentation for developers, and the problem is in the time and budget given to them to complete the game.
“UE5 or ‘lazy dev’ isn’t the issue. First, there is no ‘lazy dev’, working in video game industry is super hard, and the amount of work you need to provide is insane.”
He said that while Lumen and Nanite in Unreal Engine 5.1 and 5.2 weren’t ready at the launch, it’s not exclusively Epic’s issue: the same raw start happened with CryEngine, “and guess what? 10 years after everybody praised CryEngine with the release [of] Kingdom Come.”
“Optimisation for engine takes years, a lot of years, and Epic has already nearly doubled performance since UE 5.0 (we are currently with UE 5.6).”
“So don’t stop complaining about performance, because performance, and I will always advocate for that, is super important, and every game should put effort into it. Be vocal about it because that allows us, game [developers], to [tell publishers that] performance is crucial for a game’s success, but that can only work if you are properly educated. Blame the right thing if you really want something to change.”
We’ll see how optimized Beautiful Light is when it launches in December of 2026.
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