Have you ever found yourself deciding against a game you would otherwise check out because of what game engine it uses?
Yes, because of some shit the company pulled I’m no longer interested in games made in Unity.
Increasingly yes, Unity is spyware and UE5 games all play, look and feel the same.
Yes, sort of. I absolutely hate the visual artifacts from TAA and from upscaling, which are both much more commonly used in UE5 games.
I’m also much more likely to try custom-engine games, just because I think people making their own engines is pretty cool ! I have only implemented very basic stuff myself, but it was very interesting to do !
If I see it’s Unreal 5, I fully expect it to look like shit and perform weird, so it has some weight on my decision.
It has a huge impact for me, most notably unreal engine because of how poorly most games made with it run, and it visually looking very soft or blurry in some games. So it’s something I check before looking at buying a game.
If the deployment cycle started before Unity pulled their shit, I wont hold it against them for finishing with it.
People need to invest in Godot now. Either in just learning it or as a finical supporter.
Otherwise, I’m always interested if someone does something in GZ/LZ/UZDoom or cooks up their own engine. Hrot has no business being as good as it is being made in Pascal by one person.
Kinda, if it uses an open source game engine then it’s a plus.
what notable FOSS engines are there?
Godot, plus there are plenty of frameworks (love2d, raylib)
bobeff/open-source-engines: A list of open source game engines. https://github.com/bobeff/open-source-engines
I only buy games made with foss stuff like Godot, pyrite, babylon, haxe and sdl and these days.
I don’t need timmy getting more money for his bullshit, and after Unity went full on fuckwit with their idiotic ideas for runtime fees they have zero trust, even though they eventually canned Riccitello and rolled back that crazy, I simply don’t have faith in them to do the right thing when presented with moral quandaries.
I only have limited resources, so I’m not going to throw money at applications supporting bullshit. Oh, and no AI garbage is built into these options.
I don’t think that has ever been a purchasing factor for me.
After getting burned by the Dead Space Remake shader stutter i am very wary of UE games and check the reviews.
Yes, although it is not just about the engine. For AAA story games (think of something like Resident Evil) I couldn’t care less, but anything small scale with great modding potential gameplay-wise, I avoid engines that compile to bytecode like Unreal because they make it insanly painful to create mods. I prefer something that I can easily decompile to look at the souce code like Godot and Unity.
But as I said, that is not just an engine issue, since you can provide official mod support on Unreal or make it harder to mod on other engines using stuff like obfuscation or IL2CPP. But in general, especially on most small-scale Indie games, just looking at the used engine is enough to determine modability and therefore influence my decision.
No, I couldn’t care less what engine devs use. This is like choosing to not buy a cake because the baker used a Le Crueset spatula instead of a Tefal one. Literally doesn’t matter as long as the game (and cake) is good.
Sometimes I won’t buy a game made in Unity. Sometimes I will. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
There’s a whole number of THQ games I never bother to get, because most THQ games feel too similiar to each other.
Probably the closest thing would be Rockstar games. GTA 5 feels alright, but in so many of their other games I do not like the feel of the physics and mechanics. Hated Manhunt, terrible game. Was forgiving of the older GTA games growing up because they were pioneering and fun despite the broken mechanics. But they have not aged well.
Not a deciding factor but it certainly tips the scale, usually in a positive light when it has relevancy.
Unity nowadays usually just works on Linux, despite usually feeling somewhat detached from any environments. Games made on RPG Maker, Scumm or to a lesser degree, Ren’Py, are super portable thanks to wrappers made for them. RPG Maker and Unity both also make it pretty obvious when a game was cheaply made. Unreal Engine’s graphics to me are anywhere between an ugly plastic/rubber appearance (but I could list some games I recommend in spite of that) to straight up and literally nauseating. Game Maker and Godot/Redot I’ve never had any major issues, so spotting them warrants a “nice, I guess” at most. And so on.
Mostly in sandbox games. This is where I’m going to interact with the environment the most, and I wanna know it feels good.
Also, I appreciate destructibility in shooter games.
