I think you misunderstood? I was referring to the specialisation of Unreal 5, which just seems to be a generation ahead of what even the best studios have come up with.
I hope I'm wrong but we've seen no sign of anything competitive so far.
sorry. yes, it seems I did misunderstand.
I half agree with Nelig. I think other engines will get there eventually as they finally move to next gen only development, but the fact that they have been working on last gen games for the first three years of gen makes me think they are like 3 years behind Epic.
Lets hope Team Ice over at ND has been working in secret on improvement to their TLOU engine, and KojiPro has been making these changes to the Decima engine while GG was busy with HFW and its DLC. Sadly, video game developers treat video games like nuclear secrets and wont reveal the fact that they are even working on a video game until their marketing cycle is ready. Look at how they already revealed Abby in the poster of TLOU season 2. Meanwhile Neil is literally the co-president of Naughty Dog and cant confirm if hes working on TLOU Part 3 even though its likely been in dev for 3 years.
Cory has been working on his new IP since April 2018. Thats 5 years lol. I am guessing he had some engineers and designers prototyping stuff while the main team worked on Ragnorak. Highly doubt they just sat on their ass waiting for the other team to finish. At the very least, they must have made changes to their engine to add some of this lumens, physics and fluid simulations. Nanite or mesh shader support for their first next gen only title is probably hoping for too much.
And like I said earlier, the meta human facial animation tech is something they can probably license without having to switch to Unreal Engine 5. Just like Quixel Megascans pretty much everyone uses nowadays. You dont need UE5 for that even though Epic now owns Quixel. Bend will likely just move on to UE5, but Sucker Punch will probably just upgrade their current gen like Ubisoft's Massive did for Avatar. Remember, Avatar apparently has ray traced foliage and they said that their tech would work on both RT accelerated GPUs and a software version for non RT GPUs. sounds a lot like hardware and software lumens to me.