Epic Games first unveiled Unreal Engine 5 in 2020. Since then, several developers and studios have come forward to claim that they’re either using the latest version of Unreal Engine to make their next games or are updating their current titles to use Unreal Engine 5. Despite this, no game that’s currently out on the market has utilised Unreal Engine 5 – until now.
Epic moves its popular battle royale game to Unreal Engine 5
Earlier this year, we broke down exactly how Unreal Engine 5 will make future games better. Right around the same time, we got commitments from The Coalition that its future games were going to use Unreal Engine 5, as well as Psyonix.
Meanwhile, Game Science provided a glimpse of just how amazing a game made using Unreal Engine 5 would look with its first trailer for Black Myth: Wukong. However, no one could have probably predicted that the first Unreal Engine 5 game would be one that most would not typically associate with breathtaking visuals.
While Epic did promise back in 2020 that it would migrate Fortnite to Unreal Engine 5 sometime this 2021, many assumed that the COVID-19 forced Epic to push back its timeline once it didn’t happen earlier this year. However, it appears that Epic was just biding its time.
After using Unreal Engine 4 ever since first launching the game back in 2017, Epic has now fully transitioned Fortnite to Unreal Engine 5. The move comes just in time as Epic released Season 1 of Fortnite Chapter 3, which introduces several massive changes to the game’s island and closes the chapter (pun intended) to the game’s previous season. In addition to making Fortnite look different after literally flipping the island over, Epic’s migration to a new game engine means that Fortnite should run and look better on the same hardware with better effects and extra detail if played on more capable PCs.
Audiences can check out some of the changes in Fortnite via the trailer above. In-between character appearances by Spider-Man and The Rock, you can see how much better the environment looks, especially when there’s all-out chaos. There are even new weather systems in the game, such as storms and tornadoes. But, if you want to have a closer look at all these changes, Fortnite is still free-to-play, so we suggest downloading the game so you can have a proper look at an Unreal Engine 5 game.
Speaking of Spider-Man, Sony just dropped the first trailer for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, which is scheduled to release on October 7, 2022.
