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It looks like a Witcher game (from an artistic PoV), just like Stalker 2 looks like a Stalker game. At the very least, the "they all look the same due to being Unreal" remark can go away.
I'l don't know what you mean by that.
Ok, I get a better picture now. Maybe it's me, my monitor (just a VA panel, but it's calibrated) or maybe it happens more with HDR, but can't say I've seen something different to the extent that will jump at me vs other games - when it comes to Gamma issues. I think Alan Wake 2 and Starfield had some problems with the gamma, nothing beyond that.
As it's been said many times in the past and shown on videos, most AAA devs don't adjust settings of eu5 much and keep everything on default then build on top of that. In effect we get badly optimised games that all look very similar. It seems it's mostly just smaller, indie studios that go very personal with ue5 engine, tweak things and optimise properly - so their games look different and work better.
The opposite is true. Smaller studios will try to keep as close to the standard engine build as possible to make engine upgrades and integrations as low maintenance as possible, as they simply don’t have the resources to maintain a custom engine. Larger studios usually end up with a more highly customised engine that in some cases can end up deviating a long way from the distributed version, depending on their strategy for long term engine maintenance, and can often be a long way ahead of Epic’s version in terms of fixes and optimisation, as getting fixes PRed back to epic takes forever. The last bug fix I contributed to the ending took about 3 years to be accepted.
Who said anything about custom engine? I'm taking about simple stuff like fog settings, AA settings etc. This being left all of default has been shown multiple times in a bunch of ue5 AAA titles analysis that I've seen online. Which is why they all look so similar in many ways.
There’s certainly issues in AAA and god knows I’ve worked on enough games stuck in development hell. But this narrative that only indie devs care about the games they make is just BS spouted by YouTube talking heads that have never made a game in their life.
I didn't say anything about Devs, I specifically underlined big AAA publishers as the culprit.They have zero passion for gaming, they only care for the monies and shareholders. Indie usually have much more freedom but also more responsibility with smaller teams. In my personal carrier (IT but not game development) I've worked for big corpos and I've worked (and currently do) for small teams with much more freedom in making decisions (but also more responsibility). There's never been any passion or meaning in the former that I could see in anyone working there, but much the opposite in the latter.
And whose fault is that? Who is making these, often senseless, decisions? Most of the time it's not dev team itself, is it? Sure, there are big projects that come out great anyway (BG3 and other) but it seems to be relatively rare these days. Unless we look at Asian games, which have much more lean approach.
Which is pretty much big chuck of my point.
