More or less nothing is optimized these days, and game prices and budgets have gone through the roof. Compared to the other games available these days (combined with how fun the game is) I definitely give HD2 a big pass on a lot of stuff. I'm honestly skeptical of Sony's involvement being a benefit, but that's mostly due to my experience regarding their attempts to stuff a PSN ID requirement into HD2 as well as their general handling of their IPs. (Horizon Zero Dawn is not only terrible, but they seem to try to force interest with a new remake on a monthly basis.)

Not true, lots of games are optimized, but it's one of those tasks that almost no one notices when you do it great, but everyone notices when it's missing, so it's really hard to tell by just consuming ("playing") games.

> I'm honestly skeptical of Sony's involvement being a benefit

I'm not, SIE have amazing engineers, probably the best in the industry, and if you have access to those kind of resources, you use it. Meanwhile, I agree that executives at Sony sometimes have no clue, but that doesn't mean SIE helping you with development suddenly has a negative impact on you.

I don't mean this is a counter-argument -- I'm really interested. What are some good examples of very recent optimized games?

Thanks for the list!

Yeah, Unreal Engine (5 almost specifically) is another example of things that are unoptimized by default, very easy to notice, but once you work on it, it becomes invisible and it's not that people suddenly cheer, you just don't hear complaints about it.

It's also one of those platforms where there is a ton of help available from Epic if you really want it, so you can tune the defaults BEFORE you launch your game, but hardly anyone seemingly does that, and then both developers and users blame the engine, instead of blaming the people releasing the game. It's a weird affair all around :)

I'm not sure having the support of Sony is that gold-standard imprint that people think it is.