Inside Epic’s Unreal Engine 5—and What It Means for the Future of Gaming, Movies, and the Metaverse
For years, the 3D software development tool Unreal Engine has powered some of the biggest video games on the market—from Fortnite to Valorant—as well as television shows like The Mandalorian and even Porsche engineering. On Tuesday, Epic Games showed off the public release of Unreal Engine 5, the engine’s first major update in 8 years.
The company promises that the new updates to Unreal Engine 5 will make it the bedrock for the next generation of Web 3 developments—from metaverse experiences to movies, and of course, video games.
Unreal Engine is the second-most widely used video game engine, trailing only Unity, and is known for its depth of features and visual quality. Unreal Engine 5 augments those strengths, giving its users hyper-intricate 3D detail, facial realism, and large-scale world building. Its release opens the door for Disney to create a live Mandalorian video game that looks nearly as real as the show does, for example, says Kim Libreri, the CTO at Epic Games.