Greetings, and welcome once again to Replay, WIRED's rundown of all of the week's big videogame news. This week we've got updates on Mafia, Grand Theft Auto V, and the Unreal Engine. Let's dive right in.
Epic Debuts an Impressive Tech Demo for Unreal Engine 5Welcome to the next generation. This week, Epic Games, a company that makes game engines and prints Fortnite money, debuted a tech demo for Unreal Engine 5, the newest iteration of its popular Unreal Engine. A game engine is a set of tools and frameworks that help developers create their games, and Unreal 5 looks mighty powerful. According to The Washington Post, the demo showcases major technological developments, including a new dynamic lighting system and a means to render shapes and textures in much higher geometric detail. As an example, a single statue in the demo can be rendered with 33 million triangles, giving it a level of visual density and complexity that no one has ever really seen in games before.
The engine will be released in full in 2021. The question is: When that happens, will games actually look like this incredible demo? Maybe eventually, if prior tech demos like it are anything to go by, though early work probably won't hit this pedigree. But it sure does look nice.
