Epic’s Unreal Engine 5 is now available for developers to start playing around with in early access, ahead of its full release likely coming in 2022.
Back before we knew what a PS5 was going to look like, we knew that Epic’s next iteration of its popular game building engine Unreal Engine was going to play a big part in the future development of next-gen titles. After seeing initial footage of the engine running on a PS5, we now have not only much more footage of what the engine is capable of but will hopefully begin to see games fully built on the engine in the coming years.
Epic does stress that the early access version of Unreal Engine 5 is not currently production ready, but working with a new engine can have plenty of learning curves, so any extra time developers can spend with Unreal Engine 5 getting to know it seems beneficial for everyone. Along with the announcement Epic released 15min of footage of Unreal Engine 5 which you can watch here.
The Unreal Engine 4 before it has been one of the most popular and successful development engines in the industry for the past six years since its release. Unreal Engine 5 now looks to be a massive jump even from 4, with new technologies for lighting like Lumen, a new virtualized micropolygon geometry system in Nanite and more streamlined and flexible control over audio systems with MetaSounds.
If you’re looking to start fooling around with Unreal Engine 5, you can do so by visiting Epic’s official website here. The sample project used in the footage shown, Valley of the Ancient will also be available along with the download for the engine, so developers can get started tinkering with that right away. After seeing standout titles from the past generation like Returnal having been built using Unreal Engine 4, it’s extremely exciting to wonder what developers will have in store for players with Unreal Engine 5.
