With only a little more than two years remaining in the current console generation, games will soon begin to fully utilize new and improved technologies in order to make generational leaps. A large part of this, of course, will be the generational leaps being made by game development engines themselves. Epic Games‘ Unreal Engine 5 has been hailed for its numerous enhancements, and now, after over a year of being available in early access, the engine has been released in its entirety, with its full feature set available for all developers to take advantage.
That announcement came as part of the company’s recent State of Unreal stream, in which it took the opportunity to once again highlight some of the Unreal Engine 5’s most notable new features, including the fully dynamic global illumination system Lumen, the new virtualized micro polygon geometry system Nanite, Virtual Shadow Maps, Temporal Super Resolution, character and animation tools, several features targeted specifically at open-world development, and more. You may find the whole set of release notes for the launch of Unreal Engine 5 by visiting this page.
Several big game companies, including The Coalition and Ninja Theory, as well as CD Projekt RED and others, have formally declared that they will be transitioning to Unreal Engine 5. Additionally, it was stated during the State of Unreal stream that Crystal Dynamics is producing a new Tomb Raider game that would be built utilizing Epic’s new engine. Other important forthcoming games, such as the next Mass Effect, BioShock 4, The Outer Worlds 2, and others, are expected to follow suit, according to reports.