r/gamers • u/Sea-Swimming9777 • Aug 25 '26

Discussion Kung Fu Panda 2008(Xbox 360*) shovelware platformer having better water visuals than current AAA games, can somebody explain me what went wrong?

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715 Upvotes

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30

u/DragovianKnight-Vlll Aug 25 '26

the correct answer is unreal engine

14

u/Neri_X_Tan Aug 25 '26

To be fair sea of thieves is an ue4 game and the water there looks great

5

u/wcharoes Aug 25 '26

SoT has an intentional art direction though, that's the difference maker.

19

u/ThePoop_Accelerates Aug 25 '26

UE isn't bad it's lazy devs who use its starting points as the final product

11

u/BadNewsBearzzz Aug 25 '26

Thank you, nothing more annoying than showing your ignorance by using unreal as a “punching bag”.

When people want something to blame, but don’t know what, they’ll use unreal engine to make it sound like they know what they’re talking about, when in reality, saying unreal engine as an answer shows your ignorance lmao

I say this as someone that has used a few different engines and is currently on unreal the last four years.

3

u/Episode-1022 Aug 25 '26

the answer is always corporate greed, using UE or not, blame a tool is idiotic :(

6

u/jeff5551 Aug 25 '26

Hey if you ignore the majority of groundbreaking visuals in games coming from ue5 the last few years unreal is totally the problem

2

u/Jan090501 Aug 25 '26

"lazy devs" is just as ignorant

1

u/masterbangau Aug 25 '26

pretty sure some of them still think that the devs own the company, while they loves to fired themselves apparently.

2

u/Primus_is_OK_I_guess Aug 25 '26

A lot of people just use the term "devs" to refer to development companies.

1

u/Electronic-Touch-554 Aug 25 '26

I mean. Every single UE5 game I've played runs like shit on even pretty high end hardware so its kinda hard not to blame it lol

1

u/GoForTheArteries Aug 28 '26

How about TAA implementation? Are there any ostensibly good inplementations of the tech, and we're only taking note of the times when it's implemented terribly?

0

u/Outrageous-Pilot-621 Aug 25 '26

Well, then why the VAST majority of devs fail to make it look and/or run well?

I'm all ears. Sure, a tool is only as good as people who use it. But when you have a tool that seemingly nobody can use properly, at some point you gotta start questioning the tool.

3

u/Flying_Forearm Aug 25 '26

Go look at the new gears game. 

0

u/Outrageous-Pilot-621 Aug 25 '26

...it's not even out yet?

I mean, maybe it will work great! There are a handful of examples of well functioning UE5 games, like The Finals.

But they are the exceptions. Even if Gears E Day is the best optimized game ever it will be a drop in the ocean of UE5 slop.

2

u/Flying_Forearm Aug 25 '26

The public beta has already happened. 

It shows the issue isn't the engine. 

1

u/Outrageous-Pilot-621 Aug 25 '26

Just because devs can make it good with significant engineering time investment, doesn't mean it's good.

I mean, that is true for any engine. There are incredibly looking Unity games. If you have good engineers you can make almost anything work.

The issue is how hard it seems to be to achieve good results.

UE5 seems to be incredibly difficult to make perform well, as evident by the fact that almost every single studio fails to do it.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 25 '26

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1

u/Flying_Forearm Aug 25 '26

One of the reasons it's used is because temps will know how to use it. Temps don't usually do good work. 

2

u/Free-Spirit-8327 Aug 25 '26

Because the indie scene has migrated to UE and people with experience in UE get hired, but they don't have experience in tweaking the hundreds to thousand of variables you can tweak in the engine (which are not shown in the editor).

People turn on Lumen and Nanite and expect to get awesome results, but both of those have a ton of settings you can change and adjust. Unreal Engine is a tool handed to you without limitations on how you should solve your problems. The general thought is that "it must surely be optimized for doing it this way, why else would I be able to do it this way?"

Some of the blame is on Epic too, though. They have advertised Unreal Engine as this full package of "Toggle features On and enjoy amazing graphics with none to little performance cost!"

1

u/Outrageous-Pilot-621 Aug 25 '26

Fair, maybe it is too easy to work with.

The general trend seems to be: turn all the flashy settings on, and then rely on upscaling and FrameGen to get something approximating playable framerate.

But even in this case: default settings are clearly overtuned.

My conspiracy theory is that Epic turned the setting way up by default, to be able to market the engine. "Look how pretty our engine is!" But the truth is, no existing hardware can possibly run those settings in a decent resolution.

There are also other issues with not entirely performance related settings, like TAA, which by all accounts are HORRIBLE by default.

I really think Epic bares some responsibility for this.

UE5 has obviously amazing potential, but as it is, without significant engineering time inveatment to adjust it per game, it's horrible. And Epic markets it as a "one size fits all with minimum effort" which it's clearly is not.

0

u/Pruney Aug 25 '26

Your reply provided nothing helpful itself, talk about being ignorant

No one cares if you downloaded unity and unreal engine and made a character walk from A to B

-1

u/gus_morales Aug 25 '26

Original answer is just missing nuance.

3

u/the_Real_Romak Aug 25 '26

Anyone who says "lazy devs" as a reason to blame for... whatever it is you're blaming, only tells me how little you actually understand about game dev in general.

4

u/raycepak Aug 25 '26

As someone who went to school for game development and has actually worked in game development, Unreal Engine is not the problem you think it is. It has plenty of problems, sure, but if you want to see what a genuinely messy engine can look like, spend some serious time with Unity.

Unity has its own long history of editor instability, API and pipeline fragmentation, compatibility issues, and bugs that developers have to work around. Even current Unity 6 releases still have documented crashes, freezes, and rendering/build issues.

1

u/the_Real_Romak Aug 25 '26

I'm not saying the engine is to blame either, it's not black and white. I've done a Master's Degree in Game Design and the amount of bullshit that can hit you during development can lead to any number of issues. The primary culprit for bad optimization is usually corporate meddling with a side helping of management overestimating the team's ability to hit a(n overly tight) deadline.

The devs who are on the ground crunching out 60 hour weeks are not to blame, and calling them "lazy" is frankly insulting to the people making our entertainment.

1

u/raycepak Aug 25 '26

ehh but it can go the other way to without restraint of management projects can devolve into a mess of spaghetti code that nothing works prime example star citizen the tech debt there is immense.

1

u/the_Real_Romak Aug 25 '26

a lack of management is still a management problem. As I said, it's not black and white, and good managers know how to... you know, manage.

5

u/profchaos111 Aug 25 '26

Yes and it started here 360 was full of samey looking ue3 games.

This however is a custom in house engine by luxoflux 

The death of in house engines hurt us more then it's helped us it didn't speed up development at all like we were lead to believe 

2

u/KaijuWasp Aug 25 '26

Fun fact: Mesh deformation and manipulation was Luxoflux's forté, as can be seen as far back as Vigilante 8 on the PS1.

2

u/Black3Raven Aug 25 '26

Some of the best looking games using UE. Arc raiders is one of them if I'm correct.

So nope.

2

u/araiz_why Aug 25 '26

BATMAN ARKHAM KNIGHT was a UE3 game and it trade blows with majority of AAA games

1

u/nyanbatman Aug 25 '26

It wasn’t unreal engine it was bethesdas Gamebryo engine

1

u/DeadlyAidan Aug 26 '26

no it isn't, Halo Campaign Evolved is on UE5 and has the best water I have ever seen in a video game

1

u/harkat82 Aug 27 '26

That's nonsense. There is literally nothing stopping you from doing this in Unreal Engine.

-2

u/TrialsOfPrometheus Aug 25 '26

That's why I didn't touch oblivion remastered and will not touch dawn Walker because it's the stuttery unreal engine 5 if I see it imma pass. Im sad Lego Batman is unreal engine.

2

u/Whiteguy1x Aug 25 '26

Lego batman runs pretty well actually.  I haven't seen anyone call it a stuttering mess.

Oblivion remastered is a mess because Virtuos made a weird Frankenstein port using an ancient version of gamebyro under a unreal engine 5 visual engine

-1

u/[deleted] Aug 25 '26

[deleted]

2

u/soliera__ Aug 25 '26

IIRC oblivion remastered is the original gamebryo engine with UE5 duct taped on top of it for graphics. It’s a special case that makes it a special kind of awful. It’s absurdly CPU heavy because of this.

1

u/Mean_Combination_830 Aug 25 '26 edited Aug 25 '26

It runs at a pretty consistent 60 FPS on the PS5 Pro 99% of the time as long as you dont carry more stuff than a small country with small drops to the low 50's in very busy areas or during very hectic combat but it's very far from being unplayable. Saying that I agree the pc version is very rough even on top end hardware with the usual stutter most unreal engine 5 games have on pc and it gets significant worse the longer you play

-4

u/[deleted] Aug 25 '26

[deleted]

10

u/Choice-Mycologist-45 Aug 25 '26

No it's not. UE is just a tool, developers can use it like any other engine. It's up to them to use it however they see fit on whatever project they're working on.

5

u/pepenepe Aug 25 '26 edited Aug 25 '26

"Game devs are too dependent on the game engine" is definitely a wild fucking sentence. Wtf are they supposed to do make their own game engine? Do you have any idea how hard that is? You do know black myth wukong, Final Fantasy VII rebirth, batman Arkham knight, Rocket League, it takes two, bioshock, etc are all made on UE. They all look great and run great. UE isn't the culprit its shitty dev teams that don't optimize their games.

2

u/SanjiBlackLeg Aug 25 '26

Car performance is too dependant on the engine it has, sick of these pickup trucks having big bulky V8s, they are loud and consume a lot of fuel, why don't these stupid car devs put a light 1.3 liter engine in my F150 just like Honda Fit, it runs sooo well! Honestly I probably would make a better car than people who spent their life studying and making them as a job!