something to shoot and means much of the game will
likely be set at night, giving UE5’s lighting tech Lumen a
chance to shine. But that’s just guesswork: all we’ve seen
of Redfall so far is a lengthy cutscene.
STALKER 2 nearly had the honour of being the first
major Unreal Engine 5 game released in 2022, but it was
delayed from the spring to December. STALKER 2 may be
a good showcase for Nanite, that “virtualised geometry”
system that allows artists to import extremely detailed
models into the game world without slowing it to a crawl.
GSC Game World showed off a
character model in early 2021,
complete with visible “scuffs,
scratches, and sticking-out threads”,
as described by GSC Game World’s
Zakahr Bocharov. STALKER’s
developers even built a “teeth tool” to
give every ugly mug a unique smile.
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice was
stunning back in 2017, and since then
developer Ninja Theory has leaned even harder into the
HUD-free, filmic approach to game design for the sequel
Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2. Ninja Theory is using
photogrammetry in Iceland to capture the landscape and
creating, then scanning, real physical costumes to create
the digital ones in the game. Senua’s facial animations in
the first game were created in partnership with a pair of
companies called 3Lateral and Cubic Motion, which have
both been acquired by Epic and brought together to work
on the Metahuman tool. You can bet that tool will play a
big role in bringing Senua’s Saga’s humans to life. When
Microsoft showed the game off at December’s Game
Awards, it still had no set release date.
DON’T MYTH
No game made a bigger out-of-nowhere splash in 2020
than Black Myth: Wukong, an adventure game based on
Journey to the West in development by Chinese studio
Game Science. Black Myth’s debut trailer looked
incredible but was actually running on Unreal Engine 4 at
the time; in 2021 the developers upgraded to Unreal
Engine 5, a process they described as “unexpectedly
smooth” in an interview on the Unreal blog.
“Nanite significantly reduces the difficulty of
performance optimization for
environments,” said tech director and
studio co-founder Zhao Wenyong.
“And with the help of Lumen, we no
longer need to bake the lightmaps or
use point lights to fake global
illumination.” Game Science doesn’t
expect to finish Black Myth until 2023,
yet we’ve seen more of it than any
other Unreal 5 game so far. There are
more games confirmed to be underway with UE5, but
with few details. Korean MMOs ArcheAge 2 and Legend of
Ymir are years away, and Square Enix is developing
Dragon Quest XII on Unreal, but has only revealed a logo.
Unreal Engine 5 has spent the last year available to a
limited pool of developers in Early Access. According to
Epic, it’s finally going to be available to everyone this
spring. But the games above are almost certainly not
everything in development on the engine right now. The
next time we see Vin Diesel fever dream Ark 2, Dead
Space successor The Callisto Protocol, or Mass Effect 5,
they’ll likely be showing off Epic’s next-gen engine, too.
Wes FenlonDEMO SCENES Four memorable tech demos across 25 years
FINAL FANTASY VII
TECHNICAL DEMO 2005
Square recreated FFVII’s opening to show
off what the PS3 would be capable of.UNREAL ENGINE 3:
SAMARITAN 2011
Epic made Samaritan to show the power
of new DirectX 11 tech.THE MATRIX AWAKENS 2021
This staggeringly detailed city
environment shows off the potential of
UE5’s Nanite geometry system.FINAL FANTASY VI: THE
INTERACTIVE CG GAME 1995
This Silicon Graphics demo seemed like a
precursor to a Nintendo 64 Final Fantasy.FAR LEFT: (^) Will
STALK ER 2 be able to
compete with Metro
Exodus’ level of
detail?
LEFT: (^) Black Myth:
Wukong, possibly out
in 2023, stars the
shapeshifting Monkey
King. Read Journey to
the West for a
jumpstart.
THERE’S A CHANCE
THAT THE FIRST NEW
UE5 GAME WE PLAY
WILL BE REDFALL
NEWS | OPINION | DEVELOPMENT