If you look at extra content surrounding the original, it becomes pretty clear that BGE2 is what they always wanted BGE to be in terms of scope and theme, but after so long in development now, I can’t help but wonder if the restrictions on scope were what made the original truly great.

I hope they manage to pull it together into a cohesive product eventually-- and I will be playing it when they do-- but I would be truly surprised if the sequel is as impactful or memorable as the OG

Most people saw the facial animations and swore it off before even playing the game. Looking past it’s flaws, I always felt it was a fine sequel, though the first game is definitely still the special one.

Epic provides an engine with a lot of features including a wide swath of performance optimizing tools, but it’s still up to the developers to implement the concepts and workflows correctly to keep their project bloat free at runtime. The ‘crazy visuals’ you’re used to seeing from Unreal are always going to be big studios with a team dedicated to working on optimization, or for projects that aren’t realtime or aren’t interactive.

So you’re telling me all we have to do is beg the bots in multiple ways not to read the page and only the malicious bots will get away with it? Win - win - win I think