State of Unreal 2022 Key Takeaways

It’s been nearly two years since Epic Games revealed Unreal Engine 5, the next iteration of their popular game engine. Since then we’ve slowly seen more games announced as being worked on in the new engine. Additionally, early access was provided to developers last year. Now, Epic Games has announced what’s next during their State of Unreal 2022 broadcast.

The biggest news and what many have been anticipating is that Unreal Engine 5 is now publically available for all developers. Whether you’re interested in seeing how your project might function or just want to mess around in the new engine, anyone can open the Epic Games Launcher and download it.

While the engine has already been in the hands of those in other industries such as film, vehicle, and architecture firms, one of the most talked-about examples was The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience demo. Kim Libreri, CTO of Epic Games, spoke in detail about how the created city came to life and makes use of the engine’s features. This demo is still only available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, but the entirety of the city has been released as a sample on their marketplace so anyone can see how everything came together and hopefully find inspiration for their own projects.

Nick Penwarden, the VP of Engineering at Epic Games was next to speak and introduced a new starter game called Lyra. It’s a multiplayer game project that developers can build their own game on top of and features online matchmaking as well as a design to run on different platforms.

A preview of the game and how easy it is to customize was the following focus. The capabilities of the Lumen dynamic global illumination really shined (I couldn’t help myself) here as the sunlight and how the light bounced off materials looked great. Additionally, emissive materials can properly emit dynamic light without a light actor.

It was pretty interesting to see how procedural and generated meshes could be modified on the fly, such as by dragging around and changing the size of an opening in a wall. Stairs can also easily be dragged to new lengths and heights, with new steps being generated instead of needing to be manually entered after extension.

The benefits of the engine’s Nanite feature were also gone over, especially in regards to how much easier the micropolygon geometry system allows for high-fidelity objects and scenes to be created. It’s even easier with the abundant amount of assets available, thanks to Quixel’s included Megascans library along with the Unreal Engine Marketplace, ArtStation, and Sketchfab.

As many developers have had to use forums or subreddits to share their work, experiences, or simply to ask questions, the Epic Developer Community is a new platform that aims to bring everything community-centric about the engine into one place. Developers can even upload blueprint snippets to share with others.

There are a lot of studios already working with Unreal Engine 5, which you can see in the image below. Some of those studios are working on projects we’ve heard of already such as Ninja Theory’s Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II that we last saw at The Game Awards, and others include projects like Crystal Dynamic’s just-announced next Tomb Raider game.

We did get to see proper work from a big studio in action with a cinematic test demo titled “The Cavern” by The Coalition. It’s only a minute long but it looks technically impressive, especially when it’s considered that the studio wants to bring this level of quality to the Xbox Series X/S consoles. More information on The Coalition’s work and hopes with the engine can be read here on the Xbox Wire website.

All of this is just from the keynote presentation. There is also hours’ worth of feature highlights and tech talks that were uploaded on the Unreal Engine YouTube channel to check out. They include topics such as upgrading Unreal Engine 4 projects to the latest version and two videos solely about the technical and detailed work that went into The Matrix Awakens demo. Unreal Engine 5 is shaping up to be a tremendous tool in and out of the gaming industry and we’re bound to see how it shakes things up over the next two years now that it’s been publically released.