Epic Games held a little showcase at the Game Developers Conference earlier today, called State of Unreal. Designed as a way to keep everyone who makes games up to date on whatâs in store for the industry-dominating Unreal Engine, the highlights are also obviously interesting to anyone who plays games as well.
Both Epic and some external studios took the opportunity to show off some of the stuff theyâve been working on in Unreal Engine 5. The shortest video, and perhaps most impressive, is this clip from Ninja Theoryâs Senuaâs Saga: Hellblade II, which highlights some incredible facial animation capabilities (using Metahuman,which weâve written about previously):
It still doesnât look real, thereâs something about the exaggeration of the lips and her teeth that I canât fully explain, but it still looks amazing
Another subject of the technical showcase was action RPG Lords of the Fallen, with a more conventional look at how games are made using the engine:
Next up is this gameplay demo from Infinitesimals, a backyard bugs game that Iâm pretty sure was first announced years ago, but which is still in development. This clip is a little more developer-focused, but still gives you a look at how Unreal Engine 5 handles the scale of a large open world:
And finally weâve got this driving video, which is not just an ad for Unreal Engine and Epicâs Quixel, but for EV company Rivian as well (their carâs dash screens run on the Unreal Engine). This one is showing off some lovely foliage, along with some impressive driving physics as well (itâs particularly neat how the car will hit small rocks that will then fly away):
While itâs expected to take everything shown at these presentations with a grain of salt, itâs encouraging that three of the four videos here were of actual games currently in development, meaning that the usual âwell, your actual games arenât going to look this goodâ caveats we normally need on these posts arenât quite as needed here.
