Unreal Engine 5 vs Godot
To be honest I don’t really see much point in Godot. We’re talking about the Unreal Engine 5, even building in your own engine begins to pale in significance, compared to what you can do just by Learning Unreal Better. Just invest in Unreal, it’s easier, you get better results, as an indie, there is no alternative. It’s Unreal or Unreal or Unreal. Vote. But perhaps I am giving Godot not enough credit. I’m sure it is a fine engine, so let’s look at the best games produced in Godot.
Deponia.
Moving on…..
Sumimasen. I’m afraid I don’t recognize any of those games. It’s not even that they aren’t good, many unknown games are very good. You can find a hidden gem under every rock. But I don’t recognize anything there except Deponia, that is not a good start for Godot.
It would feel like a depressing mismatch to start listing off games made in … Good Lord this article is about Unreal 5, not Unreal in general. There are NOT actually a large number of prominent games made in Unreal 5, because the engine is an experimental demon from some godforsaken 1.5 billion dollar Epic Games fortress somewhere. It is undefeatable. It’s like tank vs kitten, who will win? Morally the tank cannot lose, but the kitten is alive, and therefore at a distinct advantage?
By the way, check out our breakdown on whether you should make the switch from Unity to Unreal.
Is Godot engine good?
Yes, but good is relative. Godot is a good Engine, especially for 2D, lightweight & open source, & it’s node system is good for beginners. But Unreal is better, it does AAA quality 3D Games, & has blueprint so it is also easy for beginners.
Is Godot better than Unreal?
No, The Unreal Engine 5 is better, the industry leader in game engines, with a multibillion dollar budget, and spearheading all the most advanced techniques in existence as they are invented. Godot, cannot compete in this landscape, it is even less good than Unity.
So what is Godot good at?
Godot is good at 2D. It’s not that Unreal 5 can’t do 2D, but that is not it’s primary focus. Godot seeks to plug the hole in the market caused by Unreal’s lax 2D performance and hopefully clean up.
Godot also seeks to be easier for a beginner to learn, it comes with it’s own scripting language, but you can also use C# and C++. It is lightweight and open source.
What is Unreal Engine 5 good at?
Let’s break this down into parts:
GRAPHICS
Unreal is unmatched in graphics. Unity requires HDRP to achieve anything resembling Unreal level graphics, the graphics achieved are not good enough to match Unreal. However, well, the brokenness of HDRP is legendary and an article in itself. Not legendary brokenness like Dark Depths Thespian Stage Marit Lage, but rather legendary for how much it is broken, even that sounds too generous. Famous for being non functional would be how I might eventually rest on describing HRDP. But this has little if anything to do with Unreal.
What do Unreal 5 Graphics look like???
For comparison… =\
Here is what Godot looks like in 3D:
It’s not that, it is bad looking, it’s just, don’t even waste my time…. Let me show you another Unreal 5 image:
If you look very carefully, there is a small increase in quality from Godot to Unreal. Enough to make a noticeable difference in quality in your games. I would say Unreal is the winner in this category.
BETTER FOR BEGINNERS
I never understood people who said Unreal is worse for beginners. I think actually, it’s intimidating to beginners. They look at the quality of games coming out of Unreal and think….. “Naw I couldn’t do that!! No way I could make that!! I’ll start with Unity.”
BEEP!!! WRONG!
BLUEPRINT
It’s actually pretty easy to learn any game engine. And Unreal is one of the best for beginners, because of blueprint. With blueprint, you can walk into Unreal with no programming knowledge of any kind, just a love of videogames, and you can start making your game, and even acquire a broad understanding of programming concepts, without ever writing a line of code. I am in the post alpha early development stage of my game, and I have yet to encounter a single instance where I needed to write even one line of code. I can do EVERYTHING in blueprint, as long as I’m not ripping the engine apart trying to build massive new features into it, I’m fine. Anything sane the engine was ever supposed to do can be done through blueprint, you can make new functions and activate them as nodes through blueprint. It is the most convenient programming tool I have ever encountered.
Is it easy to learn?
Besides, never start learning a game engine on a pretext of is this engine easy for me to learn? Instead you should be thinking, since this is a massive investment of time, what is the best end result I can get when I master this engine?
For me there is no answer to this except Unreal. Godot might get you some work somewhere, you might get a job or two if you have a good portolio piece in Godot, or if you find Godot specific work. Unreal will be sought after by big companies all around the world. Unreal 5 is the most in demand engine on the market as of today. You can make a AAA quality game in Unreal, that’s what it was designed to do. If you learn enough about Unreal, the Sky’s the limit. You could end up with decent quality high paying work, at a big company. As an indie dev, you can make the game of your dreams, and not just, you’ve always wanted to make a link to the past clone, because you’re humble. You can make something resembling Deus Ex Human Revolution, if you’re good at it. The game you ACTUALLY always wanted to make, when you weren’t feeling so humble.
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You can easily displace your 9-5 Mcdonalds/Security/Retail/Sales/Office work with fun game design work, working from home, making your own hours, through self employment. While your Mcdonalds job might pay the bills, and you will probably never drop that vat of cooking oil, you might want to work in a field with a future, and hope of advancement. Once you have a few years of game design experience under your belt, you can find well paying work at a big company. It only takes a few months to learn Unreal Engine 5 and a few months more to make your first game, you can then pretty easily get some entry level work in game design, which will get your foot in the door, and soon you can make the same wages you made at your old job, and down the road, you can make even more than that.
Checkout Gamedev.gg if you need some help, we can teach you about the basics of Unreal Engine 4 and 5, Unity, 3DS Max, Maya, and Blender. Any of these will give you a foot in the door in the gaming industry. And I assure you, it is a much more hospitable place.
Anyway back to business…..
FEATURE SET
The guy’s at Godot are screaming at the screen. “YOU NEVER EVEN INSTALLED GODOT” Yes I know, I know…..
Unreal has every feature a modern game could require. it covers every manner of UI in every way possible, it handles music and sound easily, it has the full range of operations. It has built in AI features, it has everything graphical, it just does, I can’t even explain it, it’s hilarious to even try to explain. Unreal is so feature heavy you could study for the rest of your life and still learn something new every day.
There is too much to learn in Unreal, but even just a grasp of the basics from studying for maybe a year, will empower you to make a truly amazing game. You will honestly start to turn down and look upon with scorn those job offers. I just turned one down today. Eventually you’ll just want to find something that gives you the time you need to work on your own game, which you will discover with amazement is more valuable to you than time spent working in on someone else’s commercial game. You need to find the time to build your game, no one will pay you for this, but if you find enough time, and put the work in, that game is worth more to you than any job short of working for a AAA company, and might even be the springboard to that.
WHO IS THE WINNER?
I can’t overcome the sneaking suspicion that Godot is better than it looks, and if I could get my hands on it I could make a really nice 2D game. But I just don’t see the purpose in that anymore. I want to make something that looks AAA, not use a AAA Engine to make something that looks like it was built on the SNES.
I have always felt hiding your power level in this way is a vulgar use of your time and ability, my first game was like that. Infinitely more complex than it would look from it’s simple 2D frame, but no one ever really got to see it. Well not many…. 🙂
That said, there is really no argument here. It’s kind of like, which would you rather make a movie with, a full on Hollywood budget with a team of cameramen, a professional set of scenes to shoot in, famous actors and actresses to play your roles, writers with experience in other big movies, CG Cutscenes, etc, etc. Or do you want to make an arthouse movie for 1000 dollars under a bridge somewhere???
Alan Moore prefers the latter. But I have always been a fan of Watchmen. If I had to grudgingly choose a favorite, I would go with the multimillion dollar budget myself, considering I can choose either with no difference in cost.
Unreal Wins Handily.
Final Thoughts
There’s plenty of good reasons to go with Godot, it’s good for beginners, does 2D games well, does 3D games serviceably, it’s not a bad engine by any stretch, one of the nicer ones out there, probably defeats game maker, but not Unity. Unreal defeats them all.
Unreal is unstoppable monster. The failure in grammar is required, it is unstoppable monster.
There is just no defeating Unreal right now. One day like the Roman Empire it will fall, but until that day comes, Unreal is the premier development environment for anyone sane developing games, there is literally no reason to use Unity, and by extension, anything else.
Um…..
ok maybe there’s this:
This I can get behind. If you want to make a retro 2D game, without a bunch of programming knowledge, and you want it to be easy to make and cool and fun, and you can just develop, without worrying about the problems, or learning anything too heavy that might net you unwanted employment, You can go with SRPG Studio, or something like that….. Maybe a visual novel engine…..
If you want to develop games in a serious context.
Go with the winner.
Go with Unreal 5.
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