Mostly in sandbox games. This is where I'm going to interact with the environment the most, and I wanna know it feels good.

Also, I appreciate destructibility in shooter games.

Yes, sort of. I absolutely hate the visual artifacts from TAA and from upscaling, which are both much more commonly used in UE5 games.

I'm also much more likely to try custom-engine games, just because I think people making their own engines is pretty cool ! I have only implemented very basic stuff myself, but it was very interesting to do !

Sometimes I won't buy a game made in Unity. Sometimes I will. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There's a whole number of THQ games I never bother to get, because most THQ games feel too similiar to each other.

Probably the closest thing would be Rockstar games. GTA 5 feels alright, but in so many of their other games I do not like the feel of the physics and mechanics. Hated Manhunt, terrible game. Was forgiving of the older GTA games growing up because they were pioneering and fun despite the broken mechanics. But they have not aged well.

If I see it's Unreal 5, I fully expect it to look like shit and perform weird, so it has some weight on my decision.

Absolutely. I hate unity and to a lesser extent godot because they struggle so hard on hardware they have no business struggling on.

It can, yeah.

Kinda, if it uses an open source game engine then it's a plus.

i'd say yes to a degree, games with a custom engine usually seem to be better optimised than those made with some standard engine

After getting burned by the Dead Space Remake shader stutter i am very wary of UE games and check the reviews.

The only time I notice is when it is pointed out that they are reusing an engine for a game sequel and the prior game was a bit clunky or had bugs. More of a concern about it carrying forward parts that I didn't like than an inherent dislike of the engine itself. Really more of an issue about how the studio uses the engine.

I would say indirectly, if the game engine does not work on Linux then I'm not interested.

At this point I almost entirely write off UE5 games. I assume they're smudgy upscaled underperforming dogshit until proven otherwise. Unreal Engine 4? Cool, no problems. Unreal Engine 5? Fuuuuuuckkkk no.

The game engine should not be a factor in my opinion, but sometimes I have some feelings. In the end ultimately the game itself and how fun it is is the most important factor.

• Unreal Engine 5: This engine has such a poor reception for me, that whenever I see it I dislike the game before even having a chance to play. Its not fair I know, but its also not my fault that I think like that. Often games with this engine have stutter issues, require lot of resources and for whatever reason, most AAA games launching with this engine are in a bad state. In the end I will buy a game if its good, obviously, but the engine has a little deciding factor to look deeper or not... even if its just a little factor.
• Unity: I personally don't like Unity anymore for the bullshit they did. But if I am honest, if the game is good then I do not care if its in Unity.
• Godot: I really want to like games made with this Open Source engine. But if I am honest again, I would not buy a bad game even if its made with this engine.
• RPG Maker: I am a fan of oldschool RPG Maker, so I don't mind that. But whenever I see made with RPG Maker (or suspect it), the value of the game goes dramatically down for me.
• any custom engine: I highly respect good custom engines, made specifically for the game or company. They often feel and look different, so its actually a factor. Or at least it will make me curious and look deeper into the game.

Personally yes, but I have a good reason I think. I am a Godot gamedev, so I feel a sort of kinship towards other Godot games. Like I really want to support them for whatever reason haha.

No. You can make just about any engine do just about anything, especially if you've got low-level access to it. If this question is implying something about Unreal, just level set your expectations for the performance things that usually come along with that, but it's not a foregone conclusion either.

If a games is made in UE5 I will definitely double check if the game can even run on low end hardware. And even if a game can run they often look like dogshit on low settings. Like I tried Exit 8 and it ran like shit on my low end PC. And that is a game that just takes place in a hallway.

Honestly? I like to think it does. I dislike unreal 5 and if I could I would avoid games developed/running on it, but at the end of the day the game itself is what sells me on the idea of buying it or not, the engine isn't the reason why a game will look like shit, people are making incredible things on cube dash or whatever that game is called, it's the developer that decides how good a game looks and runs. Yes the engine can definitely help the dev in those factors.

Having said that, I do have a game that I will not pay a single cent for if it is on an engine. If elder scrolls 6 is on the same engine as Skyrim, fallout 4, 76 and whatever that space flop was called, I will either never play it or at worst pirate it and never give them a single cent. That engine was held together with duck tape and prayers before it was "upgraded the first time, nevermind by the time that Skyrim came out! And this year it'll be 15 years since Skyrim came out, it's time to let go of it and develop a new engine or customize an already out there one so that we can finally be free of most of the bugs and limitations of that pre 2000 engine (the creation engine is a fork of gamebryo, which was launched in 1997, so yes, it is a pre 2000s engine)! There are PLENTY of other problems with bethesda but the engine problems are such a blatant and needed change that I will not trust their next game unless they show that they are seriously trying to fix the issues that they have ignored for dar too long (combat, proper RPG choices instead of just accepting every single quest thrown at you and all of them being linear, no actual choices, no consequences for choices, extremely repetitive quests where they're all get h quests that inflate the game time by just having you travel to he other side of the map and back (but then you can fast travel there anyway and now you are no longer immersed) and so many other problems that I cannot even be bothered to remember RN)

I forgot that this was about game engines and ended up ranting about ESO and bethesda, but honestly, the real problem with the game's engine isn't which one is used, it's almost always who is using and how

Nope.

If it's anything other than unreal engine then no. If it's UE then I will wait and then read about issues. If I see the same lazy bs then I'll pass.

Nah. Good games can be made on any engine. So can bad games.

Yes. I heavily favour Godot.

I found that games I don't like often use a particular engine, however I haven't been in a position where I thought the game looked awesome but didn't get it specifically because of the engine

Unity games give me pause, what with the opt-out rather then opt-in data collection and that there's so many games lazily thrown together with the default assets.

UE isn't a deal breaker, but so many games built on it just look like wet plastic and run like shit that I'm immediately suspicious. I'd rather play a game that has flat shading and less detailed textures with some actual personality and performance.

UE5 for me. There was only a brief time that I couldn’t play those games. It was when intel was having that voltage degradation issue on their i9 processors. UE5 games crashed so much if you had the degradation (I did). I had to hold off on any of those games until I got a new CPU. Now I only am mildly suspicious of UE5 games because they tend to either run flawlessly or be terribly optimized, no real inbetween. I check reviews first on them.

Custom physics based pixels or voxels engines are a plus to me :)

I have a grudge against Phyre Engine and Artemis Engine. So not those. I have no issues with other engines.

No not at all.

In the indirect sense that an engine might impact a game's visual appearance, hardware compatibility, or performance, sure. But I don't care about the engine specifically as an engine. That's just an implementation detail. It's just "does the game look appealing" or "does the game run well on my hardware"?

There are some cases where I can look at an engine and know that it's very likely that some feature that I want is or isn't there. For example, the (open-source) Twine engine supports interactive fiction multiple-choice Web-based games, usually written in a language called Sugarcube.

There's a similar proprietary engine and language, Choicescript, which runs in a proprietary viewer. This is used by Choice of Games LLC, which has published a large number of commercial text-based games.

The developers of the Choicescript engine decided that an "undo/go back/save" feature would be undesirable, probably because it reduced the gravity of a player making choices; they basically require a player to play the game in "ironman mode", where if anything happens that the player doesn't like, the player has to go back and play a new game from scratch to avoid it. The Twine developers decided that "undo/go back/save" was a good idea and enabled it by default (and even if a game disables it, there are typically ways to modify a Twine game to re-enable this feature). I very strongly disagree with "undo" being disabled; I feel that it's not respectful of my time, so when I purchase a Choicescript game, I know that I'm probably going to have to live with this particular decision that I do not like.

Yes.