Both Unity and Unreal have built-in tools as well as a lot of alternative middleware to build user interfaces. A lot of these tools are simply much more powerful compared to what Godot has to offer. And yeah this is not about features since even using current Godot system you can implement almost anything, but with Godot it's will take 2-3x more time.
Like there are bunch of issues with Godot UI and input handling:
* It is impossible (is it?) to set 3-5 different pairs of fonts plus colors for a few groups of controls. It's so much harder than using CSS in webdev.
* It not obvious what and why eat or blocked input. There is no visual debugger for that, only ugly text field hidden in depths of editor.
* MarginContainer use theme overrides and it breaks WYSIWYG. And there few more things I dont recall that have similar issues.
* And if you use Theme files it's required to reload the engine in order to apply changes.
Keep in mind it apply to 3.4 only since I haven't worked with 4.0 enough yet. Hopefully at least some of these are fixed in 4.x.
PS: Also there is a chance that Godot is not at fault and it's just us not being able to figure it out or that we missed something in docs. Yet this is the problems we struggled with the most while building UI for our game.
I did find a third-party plugin that looks pretty high-quality, but it hasn't been ported to 4.0 yet
That said, there's pretty much nothing preventing from people writing their own functionality to achieve this and someone actually did: https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset/1141
(note: for some, certain limitations might be dealbreakers, as described at the bottom of the description)
It's pretty cool to see people creating pieces of functionality like this, be it terrain functionality, or even the resolution scaling, which you can see a video of here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW0A-G5mMcw
I also recall there being a more static version that didn't seem to mess with your scene (as much?), but it wasn't really suitable for dynamic resolution changes at runtime back when I checked.
Now if Godot 3 could get a backport of dynamic LOD that would be great, but other than that Godot 4 is promising and it feels like the engine has a bright future ahead of it!
I just doubt that the asset/plugin situation will get anywhere close to as much of a flourishing ecosystem as Unity's, given that the financial incentives aren't quite there yet. Of course, having most of the current ones (even if a limited selection) be free is nice, though.
It was sparse on tutorial content from the community too, but that seems changed a lot too since then
I wonder what their heavily nested scene graphs do to performance but haven’t tested it
Edit: the downvote party is there, where are the game built with godot again?
Makes me wonder what else they "fixed" by changing the behavior in dubug builds and letting it crash in release.
You have to be able to trust the foundation you're building on.
Cruelty Squad and Luck Be a Landlord are both respectable indie successes.
There are probably some successful mobile titles. And it's also used in slot machines and gambling games.
They can be respectable by quantity but quality not much, Cuelty Squad simple ps1-style graphics isn't much different from the dozens out there games being developed on godot sporting the very same dull style.
Last time I looked into it, it was too far behind still, but it looks like Godot 4 will be a really cool release
Can’t really speak to the rest, although I believe occlusion culling is one of the killer features of the 4.0 release.
Godot is far from perfect. It's definitely more sparse than the others in terms of features. I've encountered some bugs (nothing show-stopping, and it's tough to say how much of that is just from using the alpha version, but it has impacted my flow). There are unfortunate quirks; for example, saving scripts always saves the whole scene, and saving large scenes can pause the editor for multiple seconds, which is a particularly annoying combination. The programming model is heavily OOP. The custom scripting language, GDScript, is a blessing and a curse; its tight integration with the engine comes at the cost of subpar tooling (and of course, just learning a new language with new quirks).
But.
Godot has the distinct feeling of being cohesive. It feels like it was designed by one person, who knows what it takes to make games, and set out with a holistic vision. Everything you might need to do has an answer, or at least a story. You don't get confusing mixed signals from different parts of the interface or from the docs; there's one, intentionally-designed way to do each thing. GDScript has its quirks, but it also has very elegant built-ins for doing engine-specific stuff that would be super clunky in a general-purpose language. Using Godot almost has the feeling of using (good) Apple software; somebody anticipated your needs, and made sure they'd be met. Maybe not in the exact way you would have picked, but in a way that will work, and will fit in with everything else.
That, combined with it being fully open-source, makes it feel like it has good bones. Especially in contrast with Unity - which felt like a growing pile of corpses being tossed on top of each other with each release - it's been so refreshing that it's singlehandedly gotten me back into hobby game dev. I don't feel like I'm wasting my time learning one half-baked API that's going to be replaced with another half-baked API six months from now. For every annoyance or missing feature in Godot, I have faith that things will continue to improve - because they're built on a solid foundation - or that I could at least build it myself if I really needed to.
I believe in the vision and the future of this piece of software. And that makes it feel worthwhile to invest the time learning all its quirks.