Epic Games makes Unreal Engine 5 officially available

Epic Games announces that Unreal Engine 5 is officially available to game developers. The new engine contains several new features and improvements and should ensure that game makers can create even more beautiful worlds.

In a blog post Epic Games announces that it is making Unreal Engine 5 officially available to developers. The release comes two years after the announcement. At the end of last year, the company already showed a tech demo of what is possible with the new game engine and developers were also able to test the tool during an early access phase.

Unreal Engine 5 has several new features and improvements over its predecessor. Epic Games mentions Lumen: a system with which realistic lighting can be applied in games. Another important new addition according to Epic Games is Nanite, which makes it easier to add large amounts of geometric detail to games.

Not only the visual effects have improved according to Epic Games. It should also be easier for larger teams to work on a game’s world using World Partition. This allows a large open world to be temporarily divided into smaller areas, so that a smaller team can work on these sections.

The Unreal Engine 5 is intended for developing games on the current generation of consoles from PlayStation and Xbox, but also for PC and mobile devices. Epic Games also uses the game engine for its game Fortnite. A number of upcoming titles have now been announced that they will use Unreal Engine 5, including Senua’s Sage: Hellblade II and Stalker 2. The recently announced The Witcher game will also use this new game engine.

It was also announced during the online presentation that a new Tomb Raider game is being developed by Crystal Dynamics in Unreal Engine 5. You can watch the entire presentation here: