• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

“State of Unreal” Showcase Coming Next Month, Epic and 3rd Parties to Show New Projects

CamHostage

Member
It's super weird to hear so much about this engine and how half of the industry is using it and at the same time haven't seen any real gameplay. Matrix demo performance was atrocious and Hellblade 2 or Silent Hill 2 were almost cinematics. Were are the gameplays of those hundreds of games in development?

Gamers are used to assuming a slew of "secret projects" are being made with new engine technology behind the scenes because we're not usually treated to seeing, much less playing with, that tech before it's ready...

Unreal Engine 5, however, didn't work that way.

When Epic showed it in May of 2020, that really was a global first-time showing of the engine outside of some very specific high-level partnerships. And only Epic had those tools; Hellblade 2 and STALKER 2 didn't secretly have UE5 in the lab at that time, despite the fact that they were among the first to announce use of the engine and had previously run teasers for their games. (BTW, apparently even Epic only had its UE5 prototype production-ready for their "Lumen in the Land of Nanite" debut in September of 2019.) Close partners like The Coalition were still building prototypes in UE4 to get ready for UE5 as late as October 2020, months after the UE5 reveal, because Epic hadn't yet let them take home an early access build to play with.

When we saw UE5 in May 2020, we all thought, "Oh man, here we go...", and then when UE5 Early Access released in May of 2021, we thought, "It has begun...!" But looking back, we should actually have known that we weren't being teased; we were seeing actual the state of UE5 in real time. When you first saw Lumen and Nanite at home, so did professional game designers, and when homebrewers got their hands on the Early Access build, so did most game development studios.

You weren't being shown a magic trick, you were actually there as it happened... and yet, we're still waiting for "the prestige" because we're so used to there being secrets behind the curtain.

maxresdefault.jpg

We believed that this is what PS5/XSSX console games would look like at launch, but this was still experimental tech, still a ways away from working fully in real games.)

The timeline messes with your head, but when you realize that game developers really have had less than 2 years using UE5 and that big-budget games take 3-5 years to make, it starts to become clear what the state of UE5 game production is.
 
Last edited:
Top Bottom