Which Game Engine Is Best In 2025? UNITY vs. UNREAL?

Which engine should you use? Unity, Unreal. What's best? Especially if you want to make a 3D game or an FPS. I had a chat with Sterling Rank, the co-creator of Ready or Not, a viral tactical FPS that sold millions of copies. The whole game was made in Unreal. Conversely, my first person shooter, Twisted Tower, is made in Unity, and I was a bit, I don't know, taken a back in the conversation. See, I'll be honest. I don't love Unity sometimes. And I made it clear to Sterling Rank that honestly Unity has been a pain to work with for my FPS. But Sterling gave me some insights about Unity and Unreal that might make you think twice about Unreal. So you finally started working on this game and it's been a seven 8 year almost 8 years. Is that true?
It's got to be. Yeah. When was the reveal trailer? 2017. It's been a while. Yeah. And we've been working on the project for at least a year and a half before that. I think
it's funny. It's Yeah, it's my entire

life has been this this single project and uh it has I mean I just finished working on the going to only pass the creative road map for what we need to do and I'm like damn I'm going to be for a while which is great don't get me wrong but like I'm like [ __ ] this isn't even close to being done.
Um
you know I want to have want to tell more stories.
That's right. You know you were building all this in Unreal.
Mhm. Um, so can you talk to me a little bit about Unreal? Do you have any
I use Unity and I make a first person shooter
and it has been a pain in the butt. Like Unity is so clunky.
Yeah.
When it comes to lighting and shadows and asset streaming and culling, it's an optimization nightmare. So I could say that about Unity. What are your thoughts on Unreal? Like why did you choose Unreal? Well, I worked on a bunch of projects that were using Unreal already. Um, that was the first thing. The second thing was that I used C++, which uh Ryan was familiar with using. Um, and uh, so

like everyone who was there early on was very familiar with Unreal. And best thing of all was it cost no money to to use at the time even now. Um, we could we run Unreal for like was it two or whatever it was and we were just like, you know, just enjoying the hell out of it. Uh like I think we were just very familiar with it and we didn't have to pay. Yeah. We didn't have to pay for anything at the time. We had no no cash at all. We hadn't even put up we didn't put up the supporter thing. We hadn't even found Julio hadn't joined the team yet. Like it's a lot of stuff like that, right? So it was be as cost effective as possible because I have $10 in my bank and I have no money. So we can't pay for it,
you know.
Do you [snorts] guys owe per the amount of copies you've sold? Don't you owe Unreal a certain percentage now?
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure. Um,
do you find that to be reasonable?
I think so. I think like given what they provide you, it depends on who you ask, right? Like there's that guy on YouTube, another guy on YouTube who's been, you

know, making the rounds. Is that what's his name? He's like a tech I don't know if he's a tech technical artist or just a programmer, but he's he's an he's definitely an engineer of some kind. He's very clever. It's that guy. He's been kind of deep I don't know. He's been deep diving Unreal on how much it sucks or whatever and how unoptimized it is. Um, and how nanite's like useless and things. They think I'm very watering it down.
Do we agree with nanite? Okay,
I've tried nanite. I mean, I've seen the horror stories and I want to stay away for now. I understand that this stuff can be like pushed out before it's ready. I don't know. Um, it's probably
You're not making an open world game. It's it's close quarters, indoors, so you can take advantage of occlusion calling.
You don't have to render things at far distances, right?
Precisely. Yeah. I um Yeah. Whoever that guy is, I forgot his name, but he's been making the rounds about whether or not it's like is is this good. Is this compare it to Decimate Engine or compare it to like old engines from like 20 years ago and how much better it looked and they have multiple shadows casting. I get it. Um, but what I like about

Unreal is that it's accessible. And the thing that they didn't have back then, and this is why a lot of game companies, maybe not game companies, but a lot of indies move to Unreal and and whatnot, is there isn't really much else on the market. Um, what are you going to use Source? You going to go and like buy a license from Valve? you're going to make a mod and hope to god that Valve comes and freaking goes actually yeah here you go like there aren't that many options for you now there are there's there's go do go do go do engine thing looks great I've seen some cool games there's a bunch of cool games you can yeah you can do like you could have done back in the day like flash games like Newgrounds like you're talking about which would like the pinnacle of gaming in my opinion but then
you don't have anything else you have Unity you got to pay for and there are issues with Unity but it is still like a solid engine and it's great for certain typeyp of games. It's great for any Tarov is of FPS and it's on Unity. You know what I mean? Like you can achieve whatever you want with any engine. Um I just think it's like I get it. I get that people like that are trying to dispel things about the engine and there are problems with the engine. Absolutely. Things that don't make any

sense and they should be fixed. Um
but unless you can get a license for like Snowdrop or like Yeah, like decimal or anything else like the Horizon one, I think. I think Horizon might have also decim Tell me about those. What What are those? Snowdrop's the one that was used for the Division uh which is the Division one and two Snowdrop engine which was like you can look online for like tech tech demos of how it works and like people talking about how great it is and things whether or not that's true is a different story you know you know that uh they might have been chained to their desks at Ubisoft you never know [laughter]
um but like it looks great uh and visually it's very impressive uh and the Division holds up it's a [ __ ] awesome looking game
well you know for clarity unity you don't have to pay for Right. Okay. Yeah. So, I don't want to disrepresent it. That's a good point.
However, back then,
you had to.
Yes. You You don't I don't have to pay anything for Unity. Um to get rid of the splash screen, you do have to pay.
Well, fair enough.
And then they they got they had this weird Everybody knows about this, but the the

weird you had to pay royalties based on I can't even remember. It's so distant. Um they had they had some kind of algorithm that could determine how many copies you sold. So basically, it's embedded into your build a a ticker that checks how many games you've sold. So they're like kind of watching, you know.
Oh my gosh.
So that that ended up going away. My problems with Unity are it's the optimization. It's been such a pain in the butt
um for my for my first person shooter. It's just been such a pain in the butt. And the lighting doesn't look as good. It it just I don't know why. It just doesn't look good. Um, it looks looks like a 2005 game. That's kind of what it looks like, you know.
Are you trying to make it look realistic as well? Like, is that a big like?
Uh, I don't know. You know, I'm My game Twisted Tower is stylized. It has a Bioshock. It looks like Bioshock. Um,
but the the lighting, it doesn't look as creamy. I don't know the right word. I

don't know the right word.
It doesn't look as creamy. And it might just because of real-time global illumination, you know. It just doesn't it doesn't work out of the box.
Yes.
Um whereas Unreal the real-time global illumination does which is it's called Lumen I think right?
Yeah.
Um so
it's it's mainly the optimization stuff like the the game my brother he he has a PC that he built and it's a solid PC and I was like hey can you test my game and he tested and he's like it's running at 20 FPS and I have no idea why and it was because of real-time shadows. And so I'm sitting here going, "Okay, so I've got to be," and I don't know if this, please correct me if I'm wrong.
I don't know if this is true with Unreal, but with Unity, you got to basically disable shadows except for like every once in a while have like one light cast shadows.
No, that's true.
That's That's the same.
Is it true with Unreal?
Oh, yeah. The minute you have more than one shadow casting light, say goodbye to your your frame rates. Like your GPU just starts dying. Um, [laughter]
it's like you can there are that's the that's the like one of the points,

right? You can find engines and you can write engines that can handle that. Um, but it's just tricky to do. You can look just depends on what you where your lights are and also how far they're visible, what they're shading. I'm I'm testing my tech art knowledge here
and I'm sure Allan will watch this and he'll be like one of our tech lead. [laughter] He's going to watch this and be like, "You're so wrong. Like this is incorrect." And I'm like, "Fuck." But like it's about the shadows being cast. uh and like so so what what you're what you're impacting the amount the quality of the shadows distance the shadows are visible how many lights in one scene are shadow casting because that's more random GPU
uh and how many are overlapping and there's probably a few other things too also like the type of light if it's a point light
goes everywhere it's omnidirectional
that's four spotlights
it's shitload right one spotlight you're good to go and then a light that doesn't cast a shadow but it's just illuminating then that's obviously like
it's not free but it's it's in the same past like a decal almost free. I I dude I found that when I disabled like I had

let's say 300 lights in one scene
and I disabled all the lights and I looked at my stats. The frame rate was not impacted at all.
Yeah.
It was so weird. I was like, "Wait, so I can have so baked lighting." I I learned baked lighting for four or five months. I learned how to do all of it
and it's a pain in the butt to learn. It
sucks.
Um
yeah, I learned it all and then I realized, you know what, I don't need this.
Uh I don't need to bake lights. The problem was shadows. It was always shadows. So, I had chat GPT or I'm sorry, Grock. I had Grock.
Who did I use? No, I used I used Claude. I had Claude write a an editor tool that disabled all shadow casters
from every single object in the game. So, it ran through my whole project hierarchy. And this is what's funny is I I just wonder like why why isn't it that Unity tells us this? I don't know. Or just says like, "Hey, warning. you've got more than a hundred objects in the in the scene that are casting shadows. Um, you need to turn off the the casting

shadows. U, but then I also had to go through all my point lights and turn off the shadow casting from those. And I have to go through every level and just fine-tune and find like two or three lights that I really care about and those are my shadow casters. Is that true with y'all
in a sense? Yeah. Like you for us it's like dep you can only have so many in a space and a lot of our levels are like on top of each other, right? There's a lot of verticality.
Yeah. So they they will still trigger lights that aren't even in a visible area. There's probably ways to program that in so that it turns them off. Um and it's something that would be really cool to explore because I'm sure there are smarter ways of doing lighting.
But yeah, that that's still a problem for us too. You kind of have to pick your pick your battles. Pick the areas where the light is going to have the most impact and then go [snorts] from there. Because yeah, you can have a shadowcaster, you can have a non shadowcaster and they can still have the same effect. They draw your eye somewhere. Are they just used for a visual cue? like is it just look cool? Good for screenshots. Like there are different reasons why you might do it. Um and then the hardware too. It might be something where you go you optimize

it for certain like you optimize it for a baseline hardware and then you go you can add extra lights and that becomes layers that get selected and turned on depending on how it works. I don't know how it works in Unity but uh yeah that that's absolutely an issue. Don't worry dynamic lighting is a pain in the ass. Uh that's why
but there are custom solutions. But I think Unity has a couple really good ones like that you can get off the store, but it's it's stressing my knowledge