Following yesterday’s reveal of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 remaster, the Summer Game Fest continues with another big reveal.
Epic Games has revealed Unreal Engine 5, coming in 2021. And it’s not just a simple reveal, they showcased a 20-minute gameplay tech demo, running on a PS5.
Yeah, it’s a proper gameplay showcase. And the demo had some interruptions where it goes into gamedev mode.
The two key features coming to Unreal Engine 5 are Nanite- a feature that lets developers import their art assets without needing to optimise them and Lumen- dynamic global illumination.
These are absolute game-changers. Especially more in the development side. Epic says assets created fresh from ZBrush or CAD data- or art assets tailored for movies- can just be dumped into the engine and it works. No need to optimise the polycount, and making different level-of-detail (LOD). And less time having to bake the exact lighting points to get light shine (or not) perfectly.
Take a look at the real-time demo, cheekily called “Lumen in the Land of Nanite,” running on PS5.
Unreal Engine 5 will support PS5 and Xbox Series X, and will be supporting current-gen consoles, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android. Epic will make it available for developers to migrate their games to UE5 from UE4 in the future.
Epic Games will first launch Fortnite on PS5 and Xbox Series X on launch- running on UE4. The game will later be migrated to UE5 next year, which will pave the way for other developers to do so later.
The Unreal Engine 5 tech demo may not be a real game, but it’s the most real look we had on what next-gen consoles can actually do. And graphics and audio side of things, it’s mighty impressive, with hopefully less work needed to implement.