Why Major Games are Switching to Unreal Engine 5

A game engine is a grouping of tools or a framework of tools used to build a game. In the ever-evolving landscape of game development, the choice of game engine has significant sway over how a project turns out. There are many game engines available, many are open-source known engines that aren’t popular due to lack of support and features, there are proprietary in-house game engines built specifically for an IP and there are feature-packed commercial game engines built and maintained by corporations as products.

Throughout the last many years, the trend among larger AAA studios has been to use their in-house proprietary engines for their games as it allows them to customize, integrate, optimize performance, and adapt more easily. Studios could constantly adapt to changing trends and technology by adding new technologies and features to the same engine and using it in the next installment of their game. Nowadays, however, we are seeing a drastic change in this trend, where AAA developers like CDPR and NAMCO are switching to commercial game engines, specifically the Unreal engine. This discussion delves into why such developers are choosing to switch to Unreal Engine 5.

Why Choose Unreal Engine

Nanite

Nanite is a feature in Unreal Engine that autogenerates Levels of Detail (LODs). In contrast, in other engines, the artist must create various levels of detail based on how far away an object is from the player. So, for example, if there is a tree in the game, other engines will have you create two or three models of varying levels of detail which are activated based on the distance of the player from the tree, the highest detail one being activated when the player is up close to the tree so that they can see the individual leaves.

Unreal now has the technology to do this automatically and requires the artist to make only one model. For small 3D games that are linear or interior-based, nanite is not so useful as most of the assets are near the player at all times, techniques like occlusion culling which eats mesh data out if it’s not in camera view, are also not useful here which makes all engines viable for such smaller scale games.

The issue comes when making open-world games, especially AAA large-scale open-world games, here a lot of faraway objects are still in the camera view so LOD becomes a must, and features like Nanite become extremely attractive since the studio does not have to make three to four versions of the same object to optimize performance. This is among the reasons why open-world games by CDPR like The Witcher and Cyberpunk are moving to Unreal Engine 5.

Lumen

Lumen is Unreal’s fully dynamic global illumination and reflection system. In simple words, it uses algorithms that simulate how light behaves in reality when it hits a surface and based on the properties of that surface, bounces off of it to the next and interacts with it based on its new material properties. This allows real-time illumination and geometrically precise reflections in the game, so no tricks need to be used to create a realistic and immersive environment in games such as setting up light map farms and lighting bakes that are tedious to set up and maintain.

In older games, light and shadows used to be treated as separate entities in the game and were created using separate techniques, however, we know that in reality, they are a singular phenomenon and Lumen can mathematically capture and simulate this phenomenon which alleviates a lot of unnecessary tricks and illusive techniques which were previously necessary.

Of course, this feature leverages capabilities of modern hardware like accelerated GPUs and next-generation consoles so for indie developers who are working on smaller projects that they intend to ship on smaller platforms like the Nintendo Switch, relying on features like Nanite and Lumen might render their game unplayable on such platforms as they are hardware intensive, so switching to Unreal might not benefit them all that much. However, for AAA games with huge open worlds, Lumen makes it possible to make much larger and more detailed open worlds since the central light source like the Sun can light up spaces like under a bridge thanks to accurate reflection where it used to require other techniques used in areas which were not in direct view of the central light source.

World Partition

World partition divides the giant open world of the game into smaller blocks while development is in progress (not while playing of course) so that when a game dev is working on a specific part of the world only that part loads, thereby conserving performance and workflow.

Another feature called One File Per Actor (OFPA) allows all developers to work on the project simultaneously where each developer can work on their small part of the world without disrupting the overall workflow. OFPA was unavailable in earlier releases of Unreal, where one developer could lock out all others working on the project until he/she had committed their changes.

Unreal Engine 5 Comparison with Unity

Not so long ago, it was common practice in the AAA games industry to have their in-house proprietary game engine which would be built and/or refactored specifically to facilitate the development and performance of their games. While that still stands true in many cases such as for Rockstar, several AAA studios are switching to commercially available game engines built and maintained by companies as products not specific to any IP. When it comes to commercial engines, studios really only have two major choices, Unreal and Unity. Here is a comparison of both:

The comparison shows why AAA studios prefer Unreal Engine over Unity. While Unity aims for the AAA market with features for high-quality graphics, it’s still better suited for smaller projects focusing on creativity. On the other hand, Unreal Engine’s advanced features like Nanite, Lumen, and World Partition allow AAA studios to create hyper-realistic games for PC and next-gen consoles. However, this focus might not work as well for mobile games and smaller platforms. Unreal also benefits from Epic Games’ experience in both game development and engine creation, offering strong data visualization capabilities.

Major Games moving to Unreal

Of the many exciting releases coming next, major games that will be made with Unreal Engine 5 are as follows:

Apart form the upcoming projects, below are some of the major games you probably did not know are currently using Unreal Engine 5.