Beautiful Light Director Blames UE5 Struggles On “Bad Development Practice Rather Than Engine Flaw”

I’m sure you’ve gone through this dance by now. A new game comes out after years of hype, using Unreal Engine 5, and it runs terribly on some (or even all) platforms.

A quick glance at Twitter, Reddit, and every other site where goobers get to voice their opinion inevitably shows a wall of comments saying UE5 is bad, or praying to your deity of choice to strike Unreal Engine 5 from the face of the Earth.

The anti-Unreal sentiment is fairly popular with gamers, and comes with a lot of anxiety about future titles that will be built on Epic Games’ engine. CDPR fans in particular are dreading the change from Cyberpunk 2077’s REDengine 4 to UE5 with The Witcher 4.

This month brought about a double whammy for Unreal Engine 5 haters, with Mafia: The Old Country and Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater suffering from frame rate and stutter issues even on beefy hardware.

However, as stated by Newton’s third law of motion, an action against a body invites a reaction of equal force but opposite direction. Developers working on Unreal Engine 5 are chipping in with their experience, and they insist that the root of AAA performance troubles is simple: good old skill issue.

If Unreal Engine 5 is so bad, then how do you explain the performance of The Finals, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, or even Marvel Rivals? That’s the question put forth by Eric “Aheyrs” Rajot, game director for horror extraction shooter Beautiful Light.

The developer has long been pushing back on the blanket criticism of Unreal Engine 5, backed by personal experience, since Beautiful Light will also run on Epic’s engine once it comes out sometime in 2026.

In a recent social media post, Rajot said that the UE5 struggles are “mostly the result of bad development practice rather than engine flaw,” and went further to praise Epic for putting in the work “to provide excellent optimisation” tools and supporting documentation as part of the developer toolkit.

While the team behind Beautiful Light takes a more combative approach to the Unreal Engine 5 discourse, other developers try to go down the educational path.

Offworld Industries, the studio responsible for tactical shooter Squad, has been met with the usual barrage of criticism over its choice to move the game to Unreal Engine 5.

Rather than make a straight jump, Squad has decided to involve the playerbase in the process, with periodic playtests of the UE5 branch to help the devs identify issues and fine-tune things ahead of the public rollout.

As with a lot of Unreal 5 games, the early impressions were not particularly smooth in terms of performance, despite the noticeable jump in visual fidelity. The difficulties led the studio to postpone the release of Squad 9.0.

In a video interview with Slay3Kilo, Squad tech boss Norbert “Norby” Rothermel broke down some of the reasons for picking Unreal Engine 5, and the performance targets set forth by the team. It’s a good watch to understand the ‘how’ and ‘why’ teams are betting on this tech, even if you don’t care about Squad itself.

Rothermel explains that the RTX 3060 is currently the most popular graphics card among Steam users, making it “the target system” for good performance.

He goes on to say that, contrary to popular belief, developers “don’t really look at the high end at all”. As an example, Steam data shows that a significant chunk of players are still using graphics cards with 6GB of VRAM, such as the GTX1060. This has helped Offworld define the memory ‘budget’ for the game.

With the right optimization, even a computer without any dedicated VRAM can run an Unreal Engine 5 title. “You might encounter more issues like textures being blurry because the data doesn’t get fed quickly enough, or there might be more issues with frame drops,” but Rothermel notes that a 1060 or equivalent card is the minimum recommended for “a good experience”.

Regardless of the public discourse over Unreal Engine 5, it has firmly cemented its hold on games that value photorealistic graphics. From a player’s perspective, I don’t care if the engine or the developers are doing a bad job with the optimization—just make sure the game runs smoothly and everyone is happy.