On Tuesday, Epic Games officially launched Unreal Engine 5, a cutting-edge game engine that’s designed to deliver photorealistic graphics and usher a new era of game graphics.
Following several months of preview releases and demos, Epic Games has officially launched the full-fledged production-ready build of the Unreal Engine 5 today to game developers.
The UE5 features two of the most demanded features of this generation of graphics, i.e. “Lumen,” a way to add realistic lighting effects (not to be confused with Raytracing), and “Nanite,” a tool to incorporate high-quality textures into in-game environments.
Epic promises that working on UE5 will be easier and pave way for faster game development of graphically intense games.
The inclusion of tools for 3D animation and modeling directly into the editing interface helps game developers to access all the new features of UE5 within the editor.
With the announcement of UE5, industry-leading developers also announced their upcoming games built on UE5.
Notably, CD Projekt Red announced the next “Witcher” title and Crystal Dynamics announced the next “Tomb Raider” game, both of which will be built ground up on UE5.
Alongside the launch, Epic Games also revealed: “Lyra”, a “starter game” that demonstrates the new features in Unreal Engine 5.
Lyra was first shown off at Epic Games’ State of Unreal conference back in 2020. Lyra is basically a learning resource designed as a sample game project for developers to understand the frameworks of Unreal Engine 5(UE5).
It’s a multiplayer shooter video game that developers can use as a foundation to build upon, rather than building a completely new project from scratch.
Lyra uses Epic Games multiplayer services meaning it will be cross-platform play compatible meaning you can play across all platforms: PC, consoles, and even mobile devices.
The gameplay loop of Lyra is simple red team vs blue team gameplay with a common goal to reach a certain level of points to win the match. While the gameplay of Lyra seems simple, the game leverages many built-in engine features of the UE5.
