So, what's the difference and how soon can you expect to get your hands on the UE5 version? I think the above image speaks for itself. In the UE5 build we now have working prototypes of sailing and riding, as well as an early version of transformation into an exotic form. Wait, I hear you scream, it'll be an unplayable walking simulator! Fear not.
We've been rescaling our world map to take advantage of the new optimisation features of UE5, resulting in a playable area nine times the size of our current world map (not just the current playable area, the whole map).
That isn't to say it's without problems, which is why we're running the versions in parallel until we're at Alpha, but the risks are far outweighed by the benefits. Despite our initial cynicism, UE5 has won us over. We're so impressed with the updated engine that we couldn't justify continuing solely in UE4. The fidelity we've been able to achieve is honestly incredible. We're also able to drastically reduce the texture budget, lowering the impact of the game on GPUs with less VRAM. Whilst the pillars on the right are still a little work-in-progress, we're able to build a far more richly detailed world in the same amount of time. In the image above you can see approximately the same development time applied on both the left and right. What we've discovered is that we're actually able to reduce overall development time due to efficiencies in our pipeline thanks to Nanite.
Initially we avoided announcing this as we decided to not make the move if it increased the development time of the project. We've been working hard behind the scenes for the last few months alongside our normal development work and we'd like to share that with you! This has been taking up a lot of our time and we've been keeping it a mystery but a few people have already guessed we're in the process of moving to Unreal Engine 5.