Raccoon Logic, the developers behind the indie hit Journey to the Savage Planet, have officially announced the release window for their highly ambitious sequel, Revenge of the Savage Planet. The game is set to launch in May 2025 for PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store, alongside releases for Microsoft’s Xbox Series X|S and Sony’s PlayStation 5.
Journey to the Savage Planet was a sleeper title that charmed players with its whimsical humor, vibrant alien worlds, and Metroidvania-inspired exploration. After Google Stadia’s collapse, Raccoon Logic was formed by former Typhoon Studios developers, who carried forward their distinct creative vision.
Free from the shackles of corporate homogenization, this independent team, made up of key talent from the original game continues to focus on delivering titles with genuine personality and charm.
Of course, not without its share of unnecessary drama. Enter Jason Schreier, the same journalist who sat on knowledge of Activision Blizzard’s toxic workplace culture for years, in exchange for retaining industry perks. This is the same guy who laughably criticized Vanillaware’s Dragon’s Crown, clutching his pearls over stylized designs of muscular men and hourglass-shaped women, while spinning absurd accusations of promoting lolicon pedophilia.
Schreier once again stirred controversy by aiming his sights at Raccoon Logic, decrying its predominantly White male leadership team as a reflection of the gaming industry’s so-called “diversity problem.”
Despite such virtue-signaling noise, Revenge of the Savage Planet looks to build upon its predecessor’s strengths and stand out in an increasingly stale gaming market. Fans eagerly anticipate another vibrant, exploratory experience untainted by the hollow posturing of the industry’s loudest critics.
Jason Schreier, who is Jewish, took aim at the small indie studio for seemingly prioritizing merit-based hiring over tokenized diversity hires designed to appease ESG-driven global agendas and ideologies. Schreier’s criticisms appeared rooted in the broader push for performative diversity rather than allowing studios to focus on building their teams based on talent, expertise and work ethic.
Rami Ismail, executive director at Gamedev.net, chimed in on the topic, stating that “diversity is something that is either in the DNA of your organization, or it is not,” adding that it cannot simply be retroactively “added” to a non-diverse team. Ismail further suggested that companies seeking to align with these expectations must either “restart or restructure completely” to achieve such goals. More or less asserting that Raccoon Logic would forever remain a hotbed of misogyny and racism.
Alex Hutchinson, the studio’s founder, eventually waded into the debate, starting with a sarcastic jab: “You know you’ve officially launched a new studio when Jason Schreier is already trolling you.” He then addressed Schreier directly, stating he was open to discussing diversity whenever Schreier was ready.
Hutchinson emphasized that Schreier had all the necessary contacts to reach out privately but chose instead to post inflammatory comments, openly attacking his studio during its early days, seemingly framing it within a narrative of racial bias and sexism.
This commentary reflects the ongoing debate in the industry over forced diversity mandates versus allowing creative studios the freedom to develop teams organically based on skill and vision. For small, independent developers like Raccoon Logic, staying focused on meritocratic hiring remains key to delivering games that resonate with players rather than corporate checklists.
Despite public pressure and calls for change following these remarks, Raccoon Logic stayed committed to its vision: delivering innovative and memorable gaming experiences. Their debut project as a team will soon be ready for players to explore.
Revenge of the Savage Planet was announced a few months back, and the latest trailer offers a deeper glimpse into what sets this expedition apart, showcasing rail-grinding, alien-chasing, and more. What really caught my attention, however, wasn’t the gameplay, it was how incredibly crisp and polished the visuals appeared, even with YouTube’s notorious video compression.
If these early technical showcases are any indication, Revenge of the Savage Planet could set a new benchmark for Unreal Engine 5’s potential. More importantly, it highlights the kind of standard that larger, supposedly more resourceful AAA studios consistently fail to meet.
Despite its power, capabilities and potential the Unreal Engine 5 has gained a reputation for powering poorly optimized titles riddled with frame rate drops, excessive hardware demands, and subpar PC performance. Much of this stems from modern developers refusing to optimize their assets properly, combined with inherent flaws in Unreal Engine 5’s flagship features, Nanite and Lumen, which have yet to live up to their promise without introducing significant trade-offs.
Raccoon Logic aims to shatter this stigma.
A recurring issue with games built on Unreal Engine 5 is the mishandling of techniques like Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA), which rely on data from previous frames to smooth out the current frame.
While TAA boosts performance, it comes at the cost of visual clarity, introducing artifacts like ghosting during motion and blurring textures, leaving games with a washed-out appearance. In an industry increasingly plagued by unqualified affirmative action hires wasting years and hundreds of millions of dollars on blockbuster failures, TAA and temporal upscaling have become little more than lazy band-aids to mask the broader decline in performance optimization.
Visually, Revenge of the Savage Planet might be the sharpest and clearest game I’ve ever seen, even when viewed through YouTube’s heavy compression. This isn’t just about raw fidelity but the sheer clarity and crispness of the visuals in motion. Given Unreal Engine 5’s reliance on temporal upscaling, it’s reasonable to assume that the predominantly White male team at Raccoon Logic have implemented a highly customized version of TAA, or perhaps avoided it entirely.
This rare attention to detail allows the game’s stunning texture quality to shine through unfiltered, setting a new bar for modern game design by simply going back in time.
Another significant concern with Unreal Engine 5 is Nanite. Under tight deadlines, developers prioritize “quick wins” over thorough optimization. Technologies like Nanite and Lumen, while groundbreaking, encourage a shift away from manual asset refinement. Nanite’s primary purpose is to simplify asset creation by eliminating the need for manual LODs (Levels of Detail), instead streaming and rendering only the visible triangles of a model even down to microscopic detail.
However, mastering Nanite and balancing its advantages with traditional optimization practices requires time and expertise, which many teams don’t bother with.
The result is that poorly optimized Unreal Engine 5 titles often rely too heavily on Nanite, neglecting tried-and-true optimization techniques such as retopology, culling, and efficient scene management. Developers may mistakenly assume Nanite is a universal solution to rendering challenges, even though it doesn’t support skeletal meshes. This misbelief can lead to performance bottlenecks and inefficiencies.
Nanite’s approach to rendering detailed geometry in real time comes with a significant trade-off: increased GPU workload. Graphics processors must handle thousands, if not millions, of tiny triangle clusters dynamically, placing immense strain on memory bandwidth and compute power. Additionally, Nanite’s granular level-of-detail streaming results in an extraordinary number of draw calls, with one triangle rendered per pixel.
While modern APIs like Vulkan and DirectX 12 are designed to handle high draw call counts, the sheer overhead still overwhelms today’s cutting-edge hardware with minimal effort.
To mitigate this, developers are forced to rely on temporal upscaling techniques, rendering the game at a lower native resolution to reduce GPU workload. This works because lowering the resolution decreases the number of triangles processed, effectively reducing the overhead and improving performance. However, this compromise comes at the cost of image quality, highlighting the importance of combining Nanite with traditional optimization methods instead of treating it as a catch-all solution.
From the brief glimpses I’ve had of Revenge of the Savage Planet, I feel somewhat confident in what Raccoon Logic has delivered. However, it’s clear the team isn’t leveraging Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite technology. If they were, the game’s meshes would showcase highly detailed geometry.
Instead, you can tell from the rock surfaces that there’s a lack of true geometric depth. This makes it obvious Nanite is disabled, and the meshes are instead relying on textures with normal maps to fake surface details.
A normal map is a type of texture used to create the illusion of bumps and surface detail on a flat mesh without increasing its polygon count. It achieves this by altering how light interacts with the surface, producing fake shading and highlights. While this approach significantly boosts performance, it has major limitations when viewed from certain angles.
Normal maps look convincing from a direct view, but their flat nature becomes obvious when seen from the side or above, as there’s no actual displacement. Without advanced techniques like parallax occlusion mapping (POM) or tessellation, the texture can’t replicate true depth, it relies purely on lighting tricks.
That said, this performance-focused approach seems to pay off in Revenge of the Savage Planet. The colorful, cooperative alien chaos looked stunning at 4K resolution, running smoothly at 60 frames per second with no visible gameplay hitches or ghosting during the brief preview.
Revenge of the Savage Planet follows a group of cosmonauts who’ve been kicked out of the space program and find themselves stranded on a vibrant alien world. Here, they explore, scan life forms, battle hostile creatures, gather resources, and use them to craft or upgrade items.
The game offers plenty of enemies to tackle solo or with others through online co-op and crossplay, all wrapped in a visually charming package with colorful VFX. Despite being built on Unreal Engine 5, the game goes against the grain of what most studios, big and small are doing.
It might very well avoid the usual pitfalls of temporal anti-aliasing blurring, motion ghosting, and the need for expensive PC hardware to run at stable framerates. Instead, it focuses on delivering a smooth, accessible experience.
I’m definitely keeping an eye on this one. Good developers and solid practices deserve financial recognition and praise, just as the team has wisely steered clear of UE5’s Nanite in favor of making the game more playable. I’m excited to see The Savage Planet universe return in May 2025.
