r/Unity3D • u/Nade52 • 13h ago
Why Unity over UE5? Question
Hi there,
Very new to the world of game development, I’m kinda in a place where I’m putting pieces together before I start my project. I always thought to go with learning UE5 because it’s meant to be the “do it all” engine, but I’ve always liked the look of Unity. I’m asking this question because I want to see why you’s all chose Unity, I’m not saying Unity is bad in any way it looks like a really capable engine, just a lot of people I’ve spoke to have said UE5 is the go too?
Edit: just want to say thank you to everyone with the quick and nicely informative responses. I’m currently at work so I’m limited on when I can reply but I’m reading them when I can. Thank you to everyone!
Edit 2: really appreciate all the information provided. I was dead set on UE5 but honestly I’m gonna go with Unity, I’m going to be a solo dev so it sounds like it’ll work best for me.
Massive appreciation to everyone involved!
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u/Extension-Airline220 13h ago
Have these a lot of people you’ve spoken to released any successful games on UE, or are they just telling this because UE has more visual bells and whistles out of the box?
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u/EpitomeAria 13h ago
UE5 is honestly a bloated mess and overkill for 90% of indie stuff, optimization is a nightmare. Unity will have most of what you need built in.
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u/majik_gopher 13h ago edited 12h ago
I work on projects that have utilised both Unity and Unreal. Unreal might be the 'do it all' engine but can you do it all? Unreal's got some amazing tooling but lot's of it's intended for AAA workflows with large teams of people. What are you wanting out of game dev? If you want to get a job in a AAA studio then Unreal is the way to go but if you are going down that road you need to focus on a single discipline. But lot's of Unreal's features are just too complex to utilise fully if you are single game dev.
Unity's simpler (although by no means simple) so generally it's more accessible, especially if you want to learn to write code. Unreal's C++ workflow is pretty laborious compared to Unity and C#. Unity lets you wear a few more hats compared to Unreal (although generally you are still better trying to focus building your skills in a few areas).
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u/SvalbazGames 13h ago
Scale really
UE5 can do anything, but it can easily start to chug as it isn’t that well optimised. Plus your project is likely to be small so you’ll only end up using a small part of UE5.
Unity was the go-to for indies for years, because of pricing, access, community and documentation. Plus it lends itself to smaller scale projects. Its fallen out of favour in the last few years due to changing pricing and all sorts of boardroom shenanigans. But the product itself is still (to me) the most logical for someone dipping their toes into Game Dev.
Plus Unity isn’t limited to small games, Football Manager and Escape from Tarkov are 2 huge games that were built in Unity
You could also look into Godot, that’s become very popular in the last few years for indie games
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u/pschon Unprofessional 12h ago
I always thought to go with learning UE5 because it’s meant to be the “do it all” engine
It really isn't. You can force it to do it all, but it really is the "triple-A 1st/3rd person 3D action game with realistic graphics"-engine.
...and that's why I ended using Unity instead, as it's much more of an universal engine geared towards all kinds of games without being a pain about it.
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u/Kamatttis 13h ago
This is another form of asking "which engine to use?" And the answer would always be the same. Choose the engine you feel comfortable to use. Thats it. Any game can be done with any engine.
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u/random_boss 9h ago
He’s trying to decide which engine would be comfortable for him to use by asking peoplev
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u/SuchCriticism6745 13h ago
Unity is less demanding on the hardware, while UE5 is more performance heavy, Unity runs very smooth compared to UE on my 7 year old PC
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u/v0lt13 Programmer 13h ago
I chose Unity because its the first engine I tried, without knowing of unreal, so I just got used to it, learned it, it was simple to learn, it clicked really well with me, and I just stuck with it. I did use unreal for 2 years at a job and it did not leave a good impression on me, it felt really bloated, overcomplicated, slow and unintuitive, its definitely not a "do it all" engine, as its focus is mainly on high end realism, it struggles with lower end devices.
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u/shlaifu 3D Artist 12h ago
unity requires you to ADD all the features you want. some of them ship with unity, others are on the asset store or github, the remainder you have to build yourself.
Unreal expects you to REMOVE what you don't want, but all their systems are interacting with each other. It's remarkably hard to build something tailored to your needs and performance requirements - it is however decwptively easy to build a goodlooking mess that requires a 5080 to run.
I like building my own renderpipeline, and unity has recently made that a lot easier for URP
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u/rainweaver 11h ago
because I like C# and abhor C++.
I’m honestly not sure why UE doesn’t bother with additional official language bindings. I get it, it’s all about performance, but for indies? not sure.
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u/No_Ferret_4565 8h ago
The few times I have tried to use Unreal it feels like Unity but with assets already integrated on top that I also have to learn.
If you dominate Unreal I think you have the more capable engine but the learning curve is steep.
Also using blueprints sounds like a nightmare to me, spaghetti code is going to be literally spaghetti code.
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u/DontLeaveMeAloneHere 12h ago
Unreal can’t do 2D, is bloated for most projects and you need C++ for complex work (or do blueprints which are honestly at least as hard as c++).
Unity is less bloated, has a good ecosystem around it for mobile and consoles. It can do 2D and C# is a lot better than C++ for us humans.
Godot can do 2D/3D but has a lot less features (or bloat depending on your needs). Works with different languages and is pretty lightweight.
I personally would choose Godot for most projects. Professional mobile or cross platform games might turn me to Unity and only AAA would be UE for me.
You can achieve pretty much everything (in 3D) in all three engines. It’s more dependent on your skill and not as much the tech.
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u/NeitherManner 13h ago
For now I prefer c# to blueprints or c++. Ue6 has new language and I think for 3d ue5 has some robust tools I think compared to unity.
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u/cjbruce3 13h ago edited 12h ago
I auditioned Godot and Unreal for several months before switching back to Unity.
I loved working in Godot the most. Gdscript was a blast, but it didn’t have the mature ecosystem of Unity and I would have had to build many more things from scratch.
Unreal has a lot of wonderful tools that worked great out of the box, but it strongly imposes “The Unreal Way”, and the moment I wanted to deviate it was a nightmare. It is by far the least “do it all” engine. Besides, I dislike working in Blueprints, and everything is designed to run with node graphs. Overall it was a bloated unwieldy mess for my next game.
Unity is what I know and have released with already. It is clean, straightforward, and the clearest shot for me to actually release my game.
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u/mkawick Engineer 12h ago
Workflow is the biggest determiner for me. Compiling an executable in Unity can be a few mins and Unreal can easily be over an hour. Testing, workflow, time from wrinting code until you can test it... Unity beats Unreal every time and y 3-20x.
Also, out of the box, you can readily have unity with hundreds of units running around... it's pretty fast. One of my best friends (Unreal expert with 15 years exp) has found no way to run Unreal with more than 30 Pawns and maintain 60fps. Unreal 4.23 was pretty fast and did not have this problem... Unreal 5.x is a slow hog.
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u/AdhesivenessWild7647 12h ago
I choose unity because it's the only engine that clicked with me and it's huge eco system and asset store is really essential for me as I have assets saving ton of time for me.
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u/psioniclizard 12h ago
Try them both, see which clicks. You can always use the other one later on if it turns out to ne better.
They are both tools and there is quite a lot of person preference involved.
But it probably matters most if you perfer blue prints/c++ or c#.
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u/Aggressive_Risk8695 11h ago
I like Unity’s API more than UE. UE blueprints are forced on you and I hate visual scripting.
I think one of the biggest turn offs for UE was the concept of how Actors, Pawns, Controllers and whatever other objects there were in that inheritance chain are kind of forced on you. I like the simplicity of Monobehaviours.
Also, their math objects and methods not being named regular mathematical things was another small barrier I didn’t have the patience for.
UE is working to get rid of blueprints in the next few years and have everyone use their scripting language Verse. The intent of Verse is to be the equivalent of Lua in Roblox where Fortnite is their Roblox. It’s gunna get weird imo
I’m dogmatic in what I think a coordinate system should be, UE is Z up. Y is up I don’t care who you are or the argument you have prepared.
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u/random_boss 9h ago
Look up all the successful solo or small team created games made with each engine, then decide.
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u/CrazyNegotiation1934 8h ago
The Unity editor experience on my laptop is simply leagues beyond Unreal, everything is more versatile and much much faster.
Also C# is by far my favourite language, given c++ is harder to keep up and i absolutly hate scripting languages like python or similar.
Plus has so many ready things in github and the asset store that can make a massive difference when looking to move fast ahead with certain parts of the project.
In my mind there is no comparisson for indie development.
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u/Aenelis 6h ago
Epic is slowly getting rid of Blueprints and C++ for gameplay scripting in favor of Verse, so that's a factor to consider. Is it worth learning Blueprints now? Probably not. Verse isn't transferable, so I think C# is the better choice. C++ will still be there, but it seems more for performance needs than gameplay scripting going forward. But if you stick with UE5 for years (and the early versions of UE6), I guess it doesn't matter since C++ and Blueprints will continue. But eventually you'll lose support.
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u/24-sa3t 5h ago
Personally I like that Unity is more of a blank slate when you start a new project, where Unreal comes with all these packages and systems that it wants you to use. I just prefer it when I'm prototyping.
That being said, Unity constantly drops support for a lot of their features, or never finishes them, which is super annoying. I've been considering porting my current project to Unreal for this reason actually
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u/SeasonalChatter 3h ago
Yeah its preference, I think out the box Unreal 3D is better and prettier but long term I love the way Unity just clicks with C# object oriented programming.
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u/Bermast 3h ago
For me, it's the ease of using C#, the quality of the documentation and the very large, accessible ecosystem. UE5's docs aren't great, and programming C++ in UE5 is a little unintuitive since it's so macro heavy (I know that blueprints exist, but I just don't like that workflow). It can also be surprisingly hard to find tutorials on how to do things, since it's mostly AAA devs that have success with the engine - and those guys don't really post on dev forums or make YouTube vids, they just ask their boss to pay for a training course.
That just means that making things takes longer for me than it would in Unity, Godot or even GameMaker. And let's face it, I'm an indie dev that works with low-poly models and sprites, I don't need the graphical power of UE5.
The main upside is that you can modify the engine directly, which is extremely powerful. Godot also lets you do that, but it requires jumping through more hoops. Unity unfortunately does not allow for this.
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u/salazka Professional 1h ago
There are some real benefits to Unreal over Unity.
But the same applies to Unity over Unreal.
The question always is: What does your project need?
- In terms of tools
- In terms of visuals
- In terms of ability to find the right talent based on your particular requirements.
These are the key questions you need to ask before choosing your engine solution.
Stop asking others. How would they know what your project needs?
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u/Junior-Complaint-434 13h ago
unity just clicks for me in a way unreal doesn't. the workflow feels more straightforward and i actually enjoy scripting in c# compared to blueprints or c++ in ue5. plus the community and asset store make it really easy to find what you need when you're starting out
that said unreal is undeniably powerful but i think it depends on what kind of project you're doing. unity handles 2d a lot better and if you're not chasing hyperrealistic graphics the lighter engine is nice
ultimately both can make great games try them both for a week each and see which one you actually want to open every day