General Gaming News

[Wrathbone]

Quite a lot of Steam reviews citing poor performance

My immediate thought reading that was "I bet it's using UE5", so I googled it. It's using UE5. Seems like every game running on it has performance issues or stutter for at least a few months until the devs address it. If it was just a case of devs getting to grips with the engine, I'd have thought they'd be comfortable with it by now.

[Sly Boots]

Quite a lot of Steam reviews citing poor performance

My immediate thought reading that was "I bet it's using UE5", so I googled it. It's using UE5. Seems like every game running on it has performance issues or stutter for at least a few months until the devs address it. If it was just a case of devs getting to grips with the engine, I'd have thought they'd be comfortable with it by now.

I'm not the least bit technically minded, so I had a quick google and it looks like people have been complaining about Unreal engine performance for years, or at least since UE4 lol. People saying it's something to do with the way shaders are compiled?

[Wrathbone]

I can't pretend to know the technical side of it, but I've also heard shaders as being the culprit for stuttering. Some quick reading up suggests there is also a skill issue in the sense that UE4 and UE5 work great if you know how to get the best out of them, but can easily result in poor performance if you don't organise assets properly, or just throw a bunch of 4k textures at the engine. So maybe studios are hiring a bunch of cheap, inexperienced devs who can make things look pretty but have no clue what will cause the engine to chug, and then the experienced devs come in later to tidy everything up.

[Animalmother]

I gave it an extremely quick go on the Xbox earlier. Seems to run fine and looks nice. The character models look weird though, are they supposed to be clones or did they just use the same face 5 times? There's also a lot of clutter on the screen, I wonder if there's a way to remove some of the HUD icons.

Will try a bit more later and see how it goes. I've practically no experience with MechWarrior. I tried Mercenaries a while back but got bored of that very quickly.

[Raid]

Clanners are genetically engineered descendants of the Inner Sphere's main military force, which fled to pastures new rather than be co-opted into another destructive war (see, I have been paying attention!). It's apparently appropriate that they all look a little messed up.

I was expecting a few performance issues just because it's UE5. Mercenaries was based on more mature UE4 tech so I'm not surprised if there's a few teething problems. The big downside to it is that it probably won't be useable in VR for a while.

[Raid]

I'm not sure what to think of this really. I haven't watched the full thing through, but I scrubbed through it and there doesn't look to be any actual fighter piloting in over an hour of gameplay (there's a bit of turret gameplay). It's an hour-long in-engine cinematic with a handful of playable bits, which perhaps shouldn't be too surprising given the Wing Commander DNA. It looks absolutely stunning, but also not what I was really expecting it to be.

...of course they're now also saying they're confident of a release in 2026, when I'm sure they said they were feature complete on Squadron 42 last year. They're taking longer to polish it than most games take to develop in their entirety.