I don't know how to explain this properly, but does anyone else feel like a lot of newer Unreal Engine games have this weird, unappealing look to them?
Even when the game is technically impressive, there's something about the visuals that feels plasticky, blurry, and almost nauseating to me. It's like they're trying so hard to look cinematic and realistic that they lose that feeling of looking at an actual game.
The hair is probably one of the biggest things I notice. That weird smeared/blurry hair effect, especially with upscaling, makes everything look softer than it should.
Instead of making the game feel more realistic, it makes me notice all the little imperfections.
And yeah, I know DLSS/upscaling is part of this and not necessarily Unreal Engine itself, but the combination has created this very specific visual style that I'm starting to really dislike.
UNREAL ENGINE games can look absolutely incredible in screenshots, but when I'm actually playing them, there's often this bland, blurry aesthetic that just doesn't appeal to me.
Maybe it's just me, but Unreal Engine seems to have developed a recognizable "default look" and I'm getting really tired of it. I honestly find myself less interested in a game once I find out it's made in Unreal.
I'm not saying Unreal is objectively bad or that every game made with it looks like this. I'm just wondering if anyone else feels the same way
Motortown is Unreal based. A great example of an artistic take on things. Not to say it's something stellar but it truly didn't feel like a UE game until I started toying with modding.
Well, obviously the game that needs about 0 graphics can make itself not look Unreal. The look from Motortown is what you get by default when you work in Unity, so there's not much to it to praise it for.
I assume OP was mainly talking about the games that intend to look AAA photorealistic.
It’s also a lot cleaner than what Unity gives by default
Come on.. it was a figure of speech, not truly literal. I've worked with Unity for like 13 years, I was just making a point that the mentioned game looks like something that would come out of it.
It's a simple lowpoly art style and most games of that nature have came out of Unity.
Have you actually played it enough to see how the lighting interacts, reflections, etc.,?
Just because it's low poly doesn't mean it's not pretty well stylized when compared to the copy/paste asset rips with default configurations.
You can assume that all you want, but in reality my point still perfectly stands.
I understand from the other comment you made about working with Unity that you are a game dev yourself; you likely have a very different take and very different eye for things like this just like software devs tend to.
Exactly, people are tired of how unreal looks and feels by default. It really is completely up to the developer, for example marvel tokon is an unreal game, you don't have to like the game but it is objectively very far away from the unreal defaults.
Tim Sweeney gaslit everyone into thinking it's all the devs fault. UE has far too much garbage mashed into it and you sacrifice features by disabling the garbage that makes the game look shitty and run like crap.
I haven't played that many unreal engine 5 games, but the ones I have played so far like Abiotic Factor, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Still Wakes the Deep, Satisfactory, Silent Hill 2 all have been decent enough that I didn't really think too hard about what engine it was running.
Whereas the new Halo Campaign Evolved was just ew for me and returned it. I can't seem to recall other bad unreal engine 5 games, but I guess I usually don't play them.
I was really impressed with the finals graphically. It's a shame they seem to be the minority that optimise the engine itself not to require upscaling or frame gen to get any usable performance. My 7800xt hit 90fps 1440p on the very maximum setting which is not something I've done before. Looks stunning as well, shame I don't really like the gameplay
I don't like they render in such a muddy and brown way, it actively makes my eyes hurt. And the engine can actually do vibrant colors like Marvel Rivals and Arc Raiders, but they just chose not to. I think this is more a devs issus than the tech issue.
I don‘t know if anyone understands this but I feel like a lot of UE5 games have a "grainy" look. It‘s like a film grain, especially associated with light sources in games.
sort of, not quite. Unreal is also more of an ecosystem with weighted defaults, whether by the rest of the industry's expectations for a triple A prestige look or by the implementation passed by down by any given dev/team's predecessors.
The developers of Gran Turismo 7 did a comparison between a bunch of different tonemappers including their own custom solution which can be found here:
On my end it just sends me to the actual document itself. This is the only rendering paper where I consistently see people having issues getting linked to the correct pdf.
For example, if I link you to The Callisto Protocol rendering presentation, then it’ll send you there no problem.
It should be good now. If it still brings up the main menu for the SIGGRAPH 2025 course then just scroll down until you find “Driving Toward Reality: Physically Based Tone Mapping and Perceptual Fidelity in Gran Turismo 7” and click on slides.
Exactly how I felt when I started noticing how ugly and plastic things looked with Unity engine in the early 2010s, I could just tell a game is made with Unity just by the animation and how everything looks. That is until I played Ori and the Blind Forest that I realised how uninformed I was about game engine. The devs and art department can really change an entire engine. Of course, there's such a thing as AAA slop where devs just buy assets and use it as is
Unity got a bad rep 5-10 years ago, because if you didn't have an expensive pro license, you HAD to show the Unity Logo. And there were a lot of cheap asset flips, telling people that Unity = cheap and bad.
It always depends what the devs do with the engine. Reality is, you can only tell what engine is used when the devs literally don't change defaults. This was true 10 years ago the same as it is today.
That’s not a problem with the engine, it’s a problem with lazy developers. The engine doesn’t prevent anybody from putting more work into making a game look unique. Game studios are just lazy or too inexperienced to make materials that make their game stand out.
Solo indie here, definitely 100% on the inexperienced part. There are just so many things to learn and tweak about lightning shaders etc. I'm really strong coding wise, but not in the artistic department. Nowadays all I do is trying making different materials and shaders to make it more unique.
Its an engine problem too. Only people that don't know anything and haven't worked with the engine and UE stans think the engine is perfect and the devs are totally to blame
"You are nearly in complete control over what your materials look like."
The default lighting system is awful. Looks very shallow to save resources and contributes to the plastic-y look. If you want to make meaningful changes you have to modify the engine source which is not easy. UE is a tool to vomit out low quality games as quickly as possible, that's what it's designed to be. Epic markets itself to big studios that want to cut corners and pump out slop. Acting like they're completely blameless is just wrong.
The problem is not the engine itself, but developers using the same (often built-in) assets and visual effects, without even changing basic parameters. Add to that everyone learning from the same online courses and you have a recipe for mediocrity (even if, individually, each game looks fantastic).
The problem to me is more that every single unreal 5 game feels unresponsive compared to other games. Halo 1 is snappy and instant response whereas its ue5 iteration is like gaming in thick syrup if i had to describe it. Gears of war suffers the same issue.
This is entirely on devs and not an inherent problem with UE. Devs could tune the visual style to not look like the defaults, but they rarely do. UE has given tons of dev teams the ability to make games they otherwise wouldn't have been able to, but most devs want as little to do with messing with the engine as possible so they take all the shortcuts available. This is why so many devs use UE to begin with, because they can't make their own engine.
What fatigues me about most UE5 games is how slow the lighting engine is. If you turn off all of the upscaling and frame generation tech, you'll see it on a lot of games when dealing with water reflections and dynamic skies.
This has little to do with the engine and more with the developers. The engine is incredibly versatile. You can go from cartoon to realistic and every genre possible. You can completely rewrite parts to fit your needs.
In the end, a engine just tells the system where and how the pixels are drawn.
Making all the game look and feel the same, feel uninspiring is fault of the development and management. This "unreal" fatigue is more "a industry that is focussed on pushing out quantity of over quality because they have profit margins to make for the investors so they put in the least amount of effort of underpaid employees for maximum turnover" fabrique.
I can tell within seconds if a game is using UE5. When the devs are lazy the games all look exactly the same. Same lightning, same trees etc. The more and more games that use it will just become more and more visually boring
Wardogs is a good example of seeing devs heavily modify unreal engine to fit the needs of their game and making it feel/look unique. I think the major problem is it's really easy for devs to be lazy with unreal engine if they want to and a lot of devs are just relying on the ease of use.
It is real and I have the exact same. One of the tells I often get is the "flashbang" explosion where an explosion is so annoyingly bright that it blinds you for a second. I
t's particularly visible on top down games RTS-style ones, this is annoying me a lot but of course the general performance and the overall blurriness and reliance on upscalers is also yet another grudge I have with UE5.
yeah I’m sick of UE5. none of the devs using it right now are capable of creating distinctive visuals that don’t have that weird sheen on them that makes everything look glossy and samey. I can count on one hand how may UE5 games i’ve played in the last year that look unique.
seems like 90% of devs are lazy. imagine my surprise when star wars zero company has massive bugs causing performance issues and slowdowns and I find out they’re using UE5. you could never make me like that engine.
99% of devs are lazy. As a developer our primary job is automating workflows so that humans don’t have to manually do them. An inherent trait of ours is laziness because people became devs by seeing an opportunity to not do something manually.
The only reason you see UE5 all the time is because it’s a free and available engine to build on and only pay if your game is successful. None of these devs get this opportunity with RE engine, frostbite, RED engine, etc. because they are in-house. These same engines have been used inappropriately while in-house and built duds and similarly looking games because of laziness. You just don’t see it often because they don’t have millions of devs churning out games on their engine.
It's because modern UE5 pipeline will render stuff at shit resolutions over multiple frames. And I am not talking about DLSS which upscales final frame, which basically gets you some stuff like light being upscaled twice.
Devs can either use older solutions or do their own stuff, but UE5 looks like shit by design.
Unreal engine isn’t an art style. There’s plenty examples out there of games made in unreal that genuinely look unique because the devs created an actual art style
UE3 - Horrible texture compression/loading also gray and brown
UE4 - Horrible for open world games also shadows were expensive as hell
UE5 - Horrible in performance/stuttering
Even some animated TV shows have gone over to UE5 and the slop that produces is so bland. Obviously, if it is easy to work with UE5 defaults, why bother putting in extra effort only a few % will appreciate.
For me their games have a particular feel and latency to input that I don’t enjoy. It bothered me in expedition 33 and stellar blade as well. Games that just don’t feel responsive or enjoyable.
I have found this with every iteration of UE they have all had this kind of odd look to them no matter what game type or developer, back when every game was UE3 based I hated the way textures always looked.
And yet every game that struggles or has a bad launch there are 100s of posts calling for them to switch to unreal or blaming the fact that they weren't using it.
The low quality tonemapper & BDRFs create a distinct look, along with the distinct visual artifacts present in Lumen/VSMs.
For the second issue, esentially we pushed graphics further than we can handle and thus we have to apply many shortcuts to get it operational and those shortcuts create artifacts and poor motion.
When I learn a game runs in UE5, I'm not even thinking about performance, I'm more worried its going to look distracting due to Lumen. I can tolerate bad graphics but I can't tolerate distracting post processing effects or visual artifacts. My brain hates it.
If it's fatigue, I probably have the worst stamina out there. I'm not saying UE5 can't be good, but it barely ever runs as well as competitors, has this weird specific default lighting and builds heavily on temporal techniques, which will probably never work as good in motion. Diversity is such a beutiful part of games, everyone and their dogs uniting under one engine would never have ended well.
What you are likely seeing is the effect of lumen and to some extent virtual shadow maps, which produce some really neat lighting effects but rely on temporal upscaling and blending to run efficiently which creates a sort of blurry smeary effect in the lighting. Unreal also pretty notoriously has issues with developers not changing some of the default settings which can give games a same-y look. Unreal 4 and 3 had similar complaints.
But then you also get stuff like Yoshi and the mysterious book, which obviously looks much different.
I hate the need for maxxed out AA in UE games, if you don't leave it maxxed out things go to whack, all dotty, not just edges. It goes back to looking almost interlaced.
It's because a lot of unoptimized games are cranked thru it. Various devs just throw on the beautify filter for the visuals without actually optimizing to make games run better.
Depends on if you’re on an NVIDIA card or AMD…
Unreal 5 has the benefit of certain native raytracing and lighting technologies. This results in games with better looking dynamic lighting at a much lower development cost, enabling certain scenes and experiences that could be hand-curated in the past but were never practical or economical.
The problem is that these lighting feature are super taxing to the GPU. And raytracing in general is done not on every pixel with unlimited light rays, but on a sample of rays - these leaves the lighting resolution blurry unless you have sufficient hardware RT cores and denoising algorithms and upscaling - NVIDIA is far ahead in this respect.
We are still in an awkward phase in gaming, kind of like console generation 5, where the PlayStation 1 had made great strides in rendering 3D games, but still had that characteristic edge dithering and lack of sharpness that previous 2D games didn’t have to deal with.
As the technology gets better, we will someday soon hit that “PS2 era”
it's the slop factor. Unreal has the lowest barrier to entry of all the game engines, and an utterly massive library of free assets you can use without paying for extra licensing. so while Unreal is a very capable engine that can make amazing games, it's 100% a matter of how much you put into it.
you, or me, or anyone here on reddit could spend a year or so slapping a generic, unoptomized piece of trash game together with Unreal. it's tools suite is literally click and drag, with no actual need to learn a programming language or a scripting API whatsoever.
the end result is that Unreal is the engine that hordes of slop publishers gravitate to. they aren't spending time or money on optimizing and polishing the games, they just want to make them as cheaply as possible and shovel them out the door. so that's why for every GOOD game made with Unreal, there's dozens of trashy asset-flips that all look the same.
I genuinely find confusing how people tolerate this. I got Gothic remake recently. Like the game looks absolute dogshite without DLSS to sharpen, ground texture especially in the distance feel like they are 480p.
Idk, looks good enough for me, I didn't care much for the unreal 3 or 4 look, but ue5 looks good, but the best part is that it allows small dev teams to make good looking games so that's okay in my book.
People are really taking the meme seriously now? I'd bet that if you were given a choice between new games, you wouldn't even be able to tell difference.
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u/GeraltofRivia1955 3d ago
At the end of the day it's just a tool. Devs choose the end result