Supposedly that's why it does things this way, right? Instead of the very long compile up front they do a smaller one up front and then run it in the background.

They seem to imply that because the game is heavy by default this is what's causing people's performance issues. I don't know that I agree, but there's probably part of it.

That loading screen takes forever. And the dance isn't even entertaining, but you can tell they thought it was "hilarious".

Plus all of the non stop talking in that game is ridiculous.

BL has always been one of those series I end up playing with a 3-5 year lag time, picking them up when theyre $5-10 on steam.

Just replace it by AI

"i already tried that"

We both know you didn't. Just unplug the damn thing.

No wonder the last guy thought we got disconnected 30s in after I told him I was unplugging my router.

"Sir? Are you still there?"

"Oh, yes. I was just waiting with the router unplugged."

"Oh. Well... it's probably fine now."

"But it's only been like 30 seconds."

"Oh, has it? Well...uh, ok I guess.

UE5 by default uses a lot of flashy tech that is supposed to improve performance, but a lot of it only does so in scenarios that are already extremely unoptimized. Using more traditional methods tends to achieve the same fidelity at a fraction of the performance cost. But there's no time for optimization, and these fancy options "just work", so there ya go.

The end result is a poorly running blurry mess of a game, but at least it's out on schedule I guess.

I looked up some videos from YouTube sleuths on why so many UE5 games suck. For any studio previously using UE3 or 4, they had to relearn/recreate nearly their entire workflow again. 5 very much changed damn near everything. But also that 5 has all this tech that everyone assumes works in all scenarios and is a miracle, when in reality it's still software tech and has very real limitations and best use cases that studios ignore. Larger studios "should" be able to trial and error while burning through $ to figure it out, but usually management doesn't give them enough time. Smaller studios can't afford to have many many months of downtime learning to re-adapt everything. It's just so damn complex that very few have had time and $ to just trial and error figure out its limitations and to work within them.

It SHOULD get better and better as time goes on, though. The tech pieces in 5 keep getting improvements, and theoretically people should eventually start to adapt to it correctly, and the knowledge should spread as devs move to different studios for new work.

No, I don't remember that at all.

Some did. Some didn't.

What you on about, there's always been crappy game releases. There's a reason "can it run crisis" became a meme. That game is a lot older than 10 years old and it was a unoptimized mess when it was released.

There was probably some peak, but I don't think games as a whole every "just worked".

If it wasn't a problem with the game, it was a problem with your hardware.

Isn't 10 - 15 more accurate at this point? I think we're older than we think.

Yeah sure but why didn't they put a "Shader Compilation" loading screen then?
Many games have one that tell you what's happening and give you an option to skip, better than having to find out via a tweet...

My experience with it has been solid, but I do run high end hardware that is muscling past a lot of stuff.

I think as usual there is some confusion between compilation stutters and the game just being very heavy for the way it looks (which it is). People online seem to be scattershot about it.

And then there's the people talking about it who don't care but like to be mad online, which is also a thing.

And then there's the weird dev that keeps mouthing off for no reason in ways that can't possibly help.

Lots of things on this one.

Still I don't think you're expected to idle for fifteen minutes. That's the point of the background compilation. You can still play more or less fine. Particularly on first boot the first fifteen of this should be a bunch of cutscenes anyway, and those lock at 30 (which I don't like at all and so many games do now for some reason).

They run differently based on the hardware you have. They can and might precompile for consoles, but there's no way for them to know what everyone's different pc set up is until it's installed.

I've played a handful of games that precompile shaders at boot up without it taking 15 minutes, and they try to hide at least some of it behind the splash screens and such. This is absurd. If pre-compilation or caching is needed, just fucking do it.

On top of what you said, that any company with the funds of Gearbox has no excuse for not being able to optimize it to happen during runtime without tanking FPS.

There are plenty of games made in UE5 that are good, it's just this idiot doesn't know how to use the engine.