Who even has time to play full price games? I have enough unplayed games piled up in my steam/epic/gog libraries to keep me busy for decades.

I haven't seen a $500 gpu in near a decade. Even used. If you see a $500 gpu today, I guarantee you it can't run Borderlands 4.

1 was fresh and new

2 was fantastic

prequel was OK

3 tried too hard and was generally average to poor

2 was where the series really peaked. The first did some new things, and brought some fresh life into the shooter genre.

2 expanded upon it, and had a much better story. It was also in the heyday of matchmaking game lobbies, so it was easy to boot up the match finder and jump into a game with someone. Probably half of my Steam friends list came from playing this game and just vibing with people on voice chat while we ran through the side quests.

The prequel was… Alright? I’d put it about on par with the first game. It didn’t bring anything new or exciting to the table, but it was good at what it did.

Then 3 was just bad. It felt really cringey, in a “how do you do, fellow kids” kind of way. Like it was trying too hard.

And now 4 sounds like more of 3. The game sounds rushed, and the CEO’s attempting to cover for that rush makes him sound woefully out of touch. There’s no good reason that cel-shaded graphics should require a 5090 to run smoothly.

From my experience graphics doesn't matter much in VR if FPS is fine. You can play HL Alyx on a what was sometime ago affordable gpu and get almost the same experience as with 5900.

On the contrary, custom engines have been bombing.

Look at Starfield or Cyberpunk 2077 or basically any custom engine AAA. Look at what happened to things like ME Andromeda.

...Then look at KCD2. It looks freaking fantastic, looks like raytacing with no raytracing, runs like butter, and it's Crytek.

Look at something like Satisfactory, rendering tons of stuff on a shoestring budged and still looking fantastic thanks to Unreal Lumen.

There's a reason the next Cyberpunk is going to be Unreal, and its because building a custom engine just for your game is too big an undertaking. Best to put that same budget in optimizing a 'communal' engine, polish, bugfixing and such.

Borderlands 4 is slow because the botched optimization, not because its Unreal.

That's just the inherent cost of going with general purpose engines. They'll always perform worse than specialized tech, but modern games are so complicated that custom engines aren't really feasible anymore.

Unreal is the king of bloat. Rather than "general purpose" they strove for "all purpose" - Unreal Engine tries to do literally everything out of the box with as many bells and whistles attached as possible. The result is that Unreal Engine games require tons of optimization to run well, and even the editor itself consumes tens of gigabytes and runs like crap.

Unity is simply a mess of poor decisions and technical debt. Their devs seem to reinvent a crucial development pipeline every few years, give up halfway, then leave both options exposed and expect developers to just automatically know the pitfalls of each. Combined with horrific mismanagement and hostile revenue-seeking, Unity has lost a ton of goodwill over the past few years. It's a major fall from grace for what was once the undisputed king of Indie dev engines.

Godot is tiny, decently performant, and great for simple games, but it's very bare-bones and expects developers to implement their own systems for anything beyond basic rendering, physics, and netcode. Additionally, the core developers have a reputation for being incredibly resistant to making major changes even when a battle-tested pull request for a frequently requested feature is available. Still my personal pick though.

Most of their customers don't listen to them. Not hear and disregard, never listen in the first place. Have no interest in game industry gossip.

Yes. It's in the top selling list in Steam and have 300k concurrent player top. People give him power to say that.