I really struggled to find a GOTY nominee, and I even ended up going thru the SteamDB release calendar. While there have been quite a lot of good games released this year, there wasn’t really any one game that stood out above the rest. And weirdly I think that’s a good thing this year. I would much rather have 10 games that are so good that I can’t say any any one of them deserves GOTY over the other, than to have one clear winner and nine meh games. (I ended up nominating Selaco btw)
I think the biggest issue this engine has is just how many features there are. There are probably at least four ways to get any given job done, and sometimes there isn’t even a clear best option. I have lots of gripes with the engine but they can be summarized as “it’s just too big” No wonder games aren’t properly optimized when UE tries to replace a dozen established tools.
Yeah I’m a big fan of upscaling myself. I hear a lot of complaints on the internet that this means developers won’t optimize their games because upscaling exists, but I think it’s great because it gives older/weaker GPUs (like your 3060) some longevity.
Heck, I use DLSS on my 4080 when I don’t want a game to suck so much power.
I have noticed this trend as well, but I think it’s actually pretty good. Your package bunch of features you have been working on under a common theme and that builds some excitement.
Consider the alternative: “Get ready for build v1053” or “Prepare yourselves for update 1.2.24” that just doesn’t sound exciting and it’s probably not gonna draw in players who haven’t played the game in a while.
And also keep the psychology in mind a little bit, It seems less impressive to release seven small updates where each update only adds one relatively minor feature rather than one big update with seven new, but still relatively minor features
It can definitely work. Some of my fondest memories in multiplayer are me playing Arma 3 on a hardcore milsim server. The immersion was unmatched for me but it’s hard to replicate. It requires everyone to play along and that just doesn’t always happen.
So I’m not inherently super skeptical about the multiplayer aspect.