I don’t disagree with that, but back then polygons are in the hundreds/low thousand, and now they have mega textures, huge models, which are simply too expensive to create. Not to say IDTech is alone in this, but I think not many companies can handle those things.
And the engine is way more complicated nowadays — UE at least has a huge community and docs.
I’m just an old man who prefers a much, much slower pace for the rendering engine. I wouldn’t mind that they grew so slow that we just got IDTech 4.
I don't lower end rigs. But I think Satisfactory has been reasonably well optimised outside extreme cases... So certainly with effort it can be made to work.
The recent Hell Let Loose: Vietnam beta was a disaster. Particularly the networking. In a game that prioritizes long range engagements due to its mil-sim like gameplay, they somehow left enabled a feature that de-prioritized tick updates for elements beyond 100m. The overall effect was that, for all enemies further than 100m, their tick rate dropped to 1 update /s. It was laughable.
But for what its worth, the graphics were nice. This however, was on a 4090.