Epic Games have announced the launch of Unreal Engine 5, the latest iteration of its well-known game engine.
The launch of Unreal Engine 5 includes several sample projects for developers of all experience, including those just starting out learning, to use and learn from.
First is the Lyra Starter Game, a multiplayer shooter project to showcase the best practices in working with UE5. Everything about the game including assets and gameplay can all be tweaked and replaced, something Epic encourages to help you in getting the grasp on utilising the game engine.
Epic is also making The City Sample, as used in The Matrix Awakens demo on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, available to download free. This is available as a full project, which provides an open world to work with, or you can download some of the contents as separate packs.
There are also more free assets available to download from the Unreal Marketplace.
Unreal Engine 5 is designed to make the process of making games, in particular, the ones that are utilising open worlds, faster and more streamlined. UE5 has Lumen, a dynamic global illumination tool to make dynamic lighting, Nanite which allows high-polygon assets to be used without loss of frame-rate or graphical fidelity, a set of tools to create faster open worlds, built-in character and animation tools and more.
You can find the full release notes of UE5 here.
A large number of game developers are currently working on games using UE5, including devs that used to work with in-house, proprietary engines. CD Projekt Red’s next The Witcher game, the next Tomb Raider game by Crystal Dynamics and also Codemasters, which has at least two in-house game engines are among the few switching to Unreal.
Unreal Engine 5 is available to download where else but straight from the Epic Games Store. It’s free to download, so any developer can start learning and make use of the game engine to create games, animation, and other sorts of media content right now.