NGL, I'm kind of glad some game studios are still out there making their own engines. I don't actually believe that every game should be written in Unreal or Unity.

Every time I play an Unreal game, I can tell it's an Unreal game. Sure, they have really great systems for allowing developers to come up with all sorts of unique battle mechanics or clever world navigation mechanics like the wall jumps in Jedi: Fallen Order. But everything else about how you interact with the world in an unreal game feels scripted.

The two biggest culprets are opening chests/doors and squeezing through tight passages. I can literally tell if it's UE5, Frostbite, or something else based on nothing but the "press X" icon and how it interacts. It's good to have standard things that game devs can just drop into their games but, after a while, it makes the world feel unnaturally limited and that's never what you want.

Give me parkour! Give me a grapple hook that lets me pull myself up onto a robot bird! Give me Skyrim's "you can walk on anything but it might not end well"! Give me Zelda's "no, seriously, you can climb anything, just not in the rain". Give me a table I can knock over and all the stuff on it falls on the floor. Those are the kinds of things that make the world feel limitless and give you the illusion that you can go anywhere and do anything. And every one of those examples was from a game with a custom engine.

It's not that technical limits are bad. Every engine has them. It's just annoying to see the same technical limits in game after game after game.

And then there's lighting. There's a particular way in which UE5's dynamic lighting fucks up when you walk from light into shadow. Again, not a deal breaker in any one game. But every time I see it, I give a little sigh and go, "Right... Unreal..."

But please don't anyone take this as a UE hate post. It really isn't. It's a love letter to the people out there still building custom engines when most of the industry is yelling at them telling them it's pointless. Users notice. We really do.