If you know your way around a PC, you’ll know that Unreal Engine 5 is earning itself an unwanted reputation. We’ve seen several high profile games launch in a less than acceptable state recently, with Silent Hill f, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, Oblivion Remastered, Mafia: The Old Country and more all recent examples. Unreal Engine 5 hasn’t been confirmed as the cause, as Clair Obscur developer Sandfall also used the engine, but a lot of people lay the blame at its feet.
As a result, Unreal Engine 5 has been talked about more negatively than positively in recent months, and now one indie studio is deciding to completely ditch the engine in favor of making its own.
This developer is OnceLost Games, a group of ex-Bethesda developers currently working on an Elder Scrolls successor called The Wayward Realms. In a post on the studio’s official Twitter account (thanks PCGamesN), it announced that it would be transitioning away from Unreal Engine 5 in favor of its own, which will be a fork of an existing engine called Wicked. It’s not an engine that’s been built from scratch, but the transition does mean that the game won’t make its end-of-year goal.
While not much information was given on exactly why OnceLost Games felt an engine switch was necessary, it did explain that this move will let them have “the control and flexibility needed to deliver the experience you’ve told us you want.” It also claimed that switching to their own engine will allow them to make “a far better game” than had they stuck with Unreal Engine 5, which isn’t a ringing endorsement.
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It then lists some of the features that this new engine will allow, such as the ability to hit over 30fps on older laptops without dedicated GPUs, and hit over 30fps on a first-generation Nintendo Switch, which essentially means The Wayward Realms will be able to run on older hardware while looking relatively the same. It’s also been claimed that modding will be a lot easier for people interested in that scene.
It’s an interesting tactic for a game so far along in development, but one that should get the Unreal Engine haters on board. At the very least, it’s not a great sign that Unreal Engine 5 is being ditched by indie developers who are choosing to delay their own projects in order to make their own engines, and it’s getting harder for Epic to claim that it’s the fault of the developers rather than itself.
- Developer(s)
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OnceLost Games
- Publisher(s)
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OnceLost Games
- Engine
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Unreal Engine 5
