So many of these newest titles look like my first unreal engine projects shamelessly so, I'm so bitchy about these types of games that pop up on the steam charts because they really are at their very best low effort cash grabs so if you see one of these pop up don't bother. These are often developers who have had millions if not billions depending on the studio backing them.
The gameplay itself appears to be typical survival crafting combined with even more typical third person combat which isn't necessarily a bad thing by itself but the game looks very unfinished and early access, they're trying to cover it up through the use of stuff like default unreal grass and metahumans but the signs are all there.
The 'monster' designs look like they've just taken a standard meta-human model and then plonked a flashlight on it, I'm not even joking. Then there was that 'siren' monster they seemed to be trying to hype people up on and it looks like they've taken some kind of radio tower asset and then plonked it on the character's head.
Then there's the hair, I realise this is a weird thing to get fixated on but Baldur's Gate 3 had this weird problem as well. The light just doesn't seem to work correctly and the colour of the hair looks too weird because of how strangely bright the lighting is. Adding to the looks of the player models themselves, it seems like they've gone with the bethesda workflow of photogrammetry and then randomly mashing together ethnicity for the sake of procedurally generating some odd looking models.
I just thought I'd do a quick write up in case you were wondering given how much the normies seem to be liking this game for the moment. Oh and by the way, something I found amusing is the resources you gather really are just randomly placed static trees or boulders with bits stuck in them depending on what resource type they are.
It has the "Type I" and "Type II" nonsense in place of male/female in the character creator, and also they made a lot of the female NPCs very tall and masculine. The only relatively hot female NPC is evil, and surprise-surprise, she's actually a "clone" of a man.
One of the main bounty hunting missions features fighting a deviant who brutally killed a man's "husband" (props to that deviant, by the way). So they made sure to throw in alphabet nonsense.
All that being said, what Lethn says about the game is correct. However, it's not an Unreal Engine-made game, it's built on its own engine, but it sure does seem to borrow a ton of stuff that feels like it was ripped right off the Unreal Asset Store, because the animations, janky melee, and combat all seem 1:1 from the Unreal Engine.
Conceptually the game is really cool with its Twilight Zone meets Lovecraft meets Secret World meets Silent HIll theme; and in the hands of a competent or visionary creative director (maybe someone like Hideo Kojima or Yoko Taro?) it could have been awesome, but it also reeks heavily of slapdash game design with an air of current year DEI infusion.
It seems there's a bit of conflicting information out there, thanks for the correction, I'll see if I can double check about what engine it uses. I swear their models and assets look exactly the same, so it could well be that they're using some other engine and importing the assets somehow which is still a bit of a lazy hack job.
I also double checked their website and it has twitch drops, which explains why it's spiking so hard on steam currently, it's being astroturfed much like a lot of free to play games that pop up these days. I remember when Valorant first came out and they made heavy use of streamers to promote.
Also yes, I hated they used to the stupid body type naming instead of genders.
Sexes. Not "genders". SEXES.
Don't let the left co-opt language and get away with it, there are only two genders.
Back before John Money twisted the language, those two words were synonyms.
You're 100% correct that this looks like a lazy hack job, though.
It seems like some kind of fork of the Unreal Engine, because you're right that some of the assets in this game really do look like they came right out of the asset store.
I actually said the same thing in another comment elsewhere discussing it with some people about how much of a lazy UE5 asset-store rip the game was, and I was corrected as well and they informed me about the team using their own in-house engine. But I'm still skeptical because it has the same floatiness as the UE5, same animation sets, same jankiness, and it even has the exact same pop-in issues that games have that use Nanite in open-world settings.
The engine they claim they're using, the Neox/Neoaxis engine, looks exceedingly similar to Unreal 4/5, based on looking at screenshots of their editor.
Can't be sure if they just emulated Unreal's UI design or if they actually tried to reverse engineer or swiped some code to create it. Looking at the documentation, class names, etc I'm not seeing a lot of distinct similarities.
Actually more distinct differences really, like Neox having a built-in native C# scripting support. While also supporting C/C++ (I'd assume the core engine code's built on that. Unity does the same sort of thing). Also seems like the default mesh format might be obj, where-as Unreal's is usually Maya/Autodesk's FBX.
As for the "floatiness" you describe in UE4/5, that's not necessarily an engine quirk I think so much as a quirk with how game developers will sometimes approach programming their hit detection. Some of these studios tend to be more concerned with basic functionality and stability, and so they'll take safer, faster, over precision and responsiveness.
Admittedly, there may be some aspects with the engine's default configuration for certain things that might play into how "snappy" things feel, but I've not gotten too deeply into investigating it.
There are a couple of areas in the engine I've wondered about though. Namely, the tickrate, and/or something about how animations are handled and processed in relation to character movement and inputs. If there actually was something going on with one of these two areas though, it should be doable to adjust things to be less floaty.
I hate floatiness in a game, this is why I couldn't stand Kingdom Come Deliverance and Star Citizen ( Though Star Ciitizen has way more problems than just that ) it's remarkable because doing a player controller of any kind is one of the most basic bits of programming you do as a games developer. Yet there are people who insist on making these strange design decisions instead of going with what works.
I notice that a lot of Unity-made games have -- as you put it -- much snappier response timing and animation and inputs are far more precise. It makes sense why devs making platformers and side-scrollers prefer Unity over Unreal as one of the reasons for that. I think it's also because of so much of the bloat in the Unreal packaging due to having to support a lot of third-party plugins and libraries, most devs just settle for the default physics instead of fine-tuning it as you mentioned.
Baldur's Gate 3, despite making the females sexual, made them ugly. The only CONVENTIONALLY attractive female is Shadowheart, all the other girls look like they got beat with the ugly stick. I don't know what it is about the way the skin or bodies look but the other characters look simultaneously 20 y/o and 50 y/o at the same time.
I can't quite put my finger on it. It's something odd about the female designs that put me off. It's like Shadowheart was thrown in there to appease those of us who like normal looking women but the rest of these just look like they tried to give these female characters ugly faces with broad shoulders while they kept their proportions as though they were in their 20s.
Lazy photogrammetry is likely a big cause, there's zero real standards in the games industry, the devs know nothing about doing 3D reptology and often either scan peoples' faces or generating them using pre-made assets. They'll either have them made beforehand by real artists' work that they then butcher or as mentioned before they're scanning in humans either actresses or employees to dump in the game and they have millions of polygons that they don't bother cleaning up which is why so many modern games run like dog shit these days. As for them making characters ugly the Battlefield 2024 asian character people were pointing out, it looks like they sculpted her face to make her look more dumpy despite being pretty RL, they beat the women with the ugly stick as much as they can because they think women being sexy is 'unrealistic'. Though let's be real it's probably an attempt by male feminist devs to get laid via virtue signalling.
On top of this, because mocap is so widely available now, I'm not even convinced that they do a lot of their own keyframing. They probably have people in suits prancing around. Now I should point out, there's actually nothing wrong with mocap by itself, in fact there's nothing wrong with using these techniques for asset creation generally the AAA studios though are lazy fucks and I guarantee you they don't spend any of the amount of time they're claiming on these games because they're just so fucking lazy. I can tell this even looking outside just at their workflow for the most part with my experience now and it's hilarious. I don't know why these devs insist on pretending their work is incredibly difficult when they're obviously just doing hack jobs every release. Even people like Asmongold are sitting there bitching about live services and he's advocating not giving them any money thanks to crap releases like Suicide Squad.
Another one as well I've ranted about previously regarding Suicide Squad is their texture work this is a problem caused by making texturing more accessible to the average human being. There's this software called Quixel Mixer and there's others out there which is software specifically designed to make texturing way easier and it's like having a 3D photoshop or something which is wonderful. However as we've seen, this also means that your average retard can and does learn lazy texturing habits and is another example of why the characters look so bad. They know nothing about how to apply normal maps properly for example and likely know fuck all about UV texturing which is likely a reason on why the lighting often looks strange on the character models they put out in a lot of cases.
I hope this clears up some detail on exactly 'why' female characters especially look so bad now even if I was being massively autistic I think it was worth an explanation.
TLDR: They're either poorly edited assets they've grabbed from somewhere, mashed together procedurally generated humans or scanned real humans that have been again poorly edited that people who don't know how to make clean meshes among other things.
These days, I am much more likely to click on a game that boasts low poly artwork and simple graphics because then I know it won't run like shit.
I have Once Human on my ignore list. I can't remember why.
so they literally ripped off the siren head meme. never got into that one, personally.