With RPG Maker made by ASCII / Enterbrain anyone can with ease (yes, even the kids) make nice 16-bit looking games. Some RPG Maker games even Steam Greenlight. Games made in RPG Maker on steam also have a nice tag “RPGMaker” in the listing. RPG Maker never pretend to be or do anything more than what it’s title actually suggests. Everyone is happy and there are no false marketing.
However, with “Unity” everything changed (and not for the better). Established game studios with a tradition of making their own game engines or licensing the best ones in the market have now started to produce in “Unity”. To make the matter even worse, the “basement acne teens” got wind of Unity and like operating a toilet, they now take collective dumps and pull the handle and all their feces are conveniently packaged into something that are listed and sold as a “game” on Steam.
The main problem here is actually not any game studio or person using “Unity” to make their game, but actually the worthless software and it’s “pay-to-play” resource libraries. If you “help” a chicken out from it’s egg it will die, it’s a sad fact of reality, and Unity by it’s own “limitations and restrictions” turns gold into dung.
A game developer can only produce quality when under constant struggle of restrictions, and with Unity’s poop-in-toilet-pull-the-handle software the marked is flooded with “proof of concept demos” falsely marked as “games”. If the situation could not get worse, it’s also very commonly to see Unity produced junk released as a “Early Access Game”.
With RPG Maker it’s downright nearly impossible to make any game look anything else than a 16-bit old school classic, it’s more or less fail-safe in that aspect, but Unity have nothing to fall back on other than a TERRIBLY OPTIMIZED ENGINE, and by god it shows!
A perfect example would be to showcase Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues that’s being developed in Unity. Without any doubt, if the developers instead would have used the Creation Engine (released with Skyrim) with all the flaws it have, the result would still have been spectacular in comparison.
Any game made in unity is by default badly optimized and have graphics like it’s from 1999. It’s unacceptable and there is no light at the end of the tunnel. As long as developers and basement acne teens can use “cheap low quality shortcuts” like Unity they will do it, and thous it falls to us as customers to boycott games made in Unity, period!