Unreal Engine 5

Did it really match with the hype? What I think of it?

Unreal Engine 5 has been out for a few months now so I’m sure at this point, many of us have some opinions about it. Did it really manage to match with all the hype? I’ve been postponing this article for many reasons. For one, I really wanted to have a solid idea what UE5 is all about, how well it performs and what kind of new tools it can bring to the table. Secondly, I wanted my first reactions to fade a bit before writing anything about it to avoid it being overly positive or negative. Maybe the biggest reason is that I’ve been just too busy to write anything down lately.

I don’t have a horse in this race, meaning I don’t really care what engine versions people are using and/or how well Epic Games is doing financially or otherwise. I did get hyped up a bit at first like many did but since then, I’ve been getting more and more critical about it. The goal here is just to share my honest opinions because I feel that things are far from perfect and there are not many critical voices out there that point these out.

My journey with Unreal Engine

My history goes way back with Unreal Engine. I started to use the Unreal Development Kit, more widely known as UDK around 2013. Most of my projects back then were focused heavily on environment art but I also started to learn more how shaders work. I also used Unity during that time for professional work, but I always felt more at home with Unreal Engine 3 because of its more artistic friendly approach on various tools like the famous node-based material editor.

In early 2016 I started to use Unreal Engine 4. It was a huge step forward from the UE3, but some tools still felt similar compared to UDK. Lighting system was more advanced, rendering supported PBR (Physically Based Rendering) and I also started to play around with the new blueprint system. 

In 2017 I started to work with a VR game project that was using Unreal Engine 4. Our team was only two developers strong so that meant I needed to really focus more on technical things and not just environment art. I didn’t have any previous programming experience, so I had to start learning how object-oriented programming worked and then translate that to blueprints. That really empowered me to be more than just an artist and I was able to start creating gameplay systems that helped to prototype various ideas fast. 

I think the blueprint system was the biggest thing for me personally that made Unreal so flexible and interesting to use. It allowed me to wear many hats because I could create art and simple gameplay mechanics and it didn’t force me to work only in one role like I felt with other engines in that time. Pretty soon I started to realize that I was able to use blueprints and make different level design tools. My previous environment art experience combined with the technical knowledge I had gained from previous projects allowed me to make tools to speed up level creation. It was a very addictive feeling because now I was able to make tools that I had always wanted to use in the previous game projects.

Epic Games also used Unreal Engine for their own games and that made it feel like a complete software package. I think that was another advantage with Unreal because it contained lots of native tools that worked well together. I could use blueprints to drive materials, lights, and animations without using any third-party tools or plug-ins. That made it a powerful system and I slowly found myself working more with these technical things than just creating art that I previously did.

I shared some of my work on social media and people started to ask if I can share these tools. Pretty soon I realized that I could turn these tools into a more generic tool library that could help other Unreal users to speed up their projects. I started to create Unreal Marketplace products that contained environments that featured these tools. Users could also then edit these blueprints and make changes if they needed to. This made it a powerful ecosystem where I could see some practical use cases in my projects that could benefit from these tools and then share these generic tools with others.

Unreal Engine 5 hype

I was amazed when I first saw the “Lumen in the land of Nanite” Unreal Engine 5 tech demo. It looked so realistic, and lighting was the first thing that caught my eye. That UE5 announcement really came from nowhere and I really wanted to know how these new features worked under the hood. Epic Games didn’t share much info so users were left to speculate how Lumen might really work, what kind of magic Nanite was using and so on. That generated huge hype and people were really anticipating when they would get their hands on it.

I also felt some pressure because I started to think about how all the previous workflows might work that I’ve been using in my previous projects. I saw a huge potential with Nanite but at the same time I thought that my projects wouldn’t really benefit much from it because I didn’t use Megascans assets or anything that would really benefit from that micro polygon tech. I started to ask questions like will Nanite break older and existing meshes, how heavy is the new Lumen lighting system, what material tricks might still work with Nanite meshes, can I still use decals, vertex colors, tiling materials and so on.

Luckily Epic Games released the first early access version of UE5 in summer 2021 so I finally had a chance to get some answers to my questions with this early access version. Fortunately, most of my worries were unwarranted. As an artist it felt awesome to finally play around with Lumen and test how Nanite handled meshes in practice but as a game developer, I felt that there were too many things still in progress and buggy. I also noticed a lot of issues with basic Unreal features like physics and performance. Some of these issues were fixed in later updates but few of them still exist today. It was also reassuring to know that I was still able to use most of my older workflows, but I could also mix them with these new features like Nanite and Lumen when possible. I fully understood that the early access version was far from done and that the final 5.0 will solve issues. That really wasn’t the case after all, unfortunately.

Using Unreal Engine 5 in practice

Final 5.0 version was released a few months ago. I immediately downloaded it and started to test how things have changed from the early access version. Another thing that I did was I converted all my marketplace packs to this new engine version. It took over two weeks to port all my old UE4 content to UE5. These projects ranged from simple environments to more complex ones with lots of blueprints, vehicles etc. I spent 10-12 hours per day, and I managed to convert 17 different Marketplace products into UE5. During that time, I encountered bugs, crashes and issues that ranged from minor things to much larger, critical issues but I also noticed positive things so it wasn’t totally negative experience. I think UE5 is far from battle tested, a term that was mentioned during a live event a month ago. 

Like I previously mentioned, I've been testing UE5 from its first early access version since last summer and things are still breaking, crashing, and freezing with the real 5.0. There are lots of the same issues that range from small little things to much larger deal breakers. It makes me sad to say that it still feels like an early access version in many ways. 

Lumen is working but there are still limitations that hopefully get fixed soon. It has come a long way from the first early access version and can produce awesome results but it’s not perfect or done. Nanite tech is awesome for opaque meshes but unfortunately games are much more than just rocks and buildings that can support that. It also feels that the new rasterizer relies on that most of the static meshes should be Nanite meshes, and I can see why. Unfortunately, there are just way too many cases where Nanite is not supported now and I honestly think games can work just fine without it. If you mix regular meshes with Nanite meshes then a bunch of things can cause issues, mesh occlusion will cost more, not to mention the new VSM system cost for regular meshes.

Chaos brings lots of issues too. PhysX features are no longer supported and will be removed soon but at the same time Chaos equivalent versions are in beta and poorly documented. I’ve been experiencing some odd issues with collisions, colliders and even with hit events. Hierarchical instanced static meshes are doing something weird with colliders too where collision works in some situations but not in others. All of this worked fine in UE4.

Lots of things are also now turned into plugins that are disabled by default. On the other hand, there are lots of plugins enabled that you don't really need for game development. At this point I would really like to have separate version of the editor with these virtual production tools disabled completely.

I know that the experience will be different if you just start building something in UE5 instead of converting old UE4 stuff there, but I would still hesitate to use terms like “battle tested”. During these last few months, I’ve been wondering what is Unreal Engine because it feels that the engine is getting bloated with every new release. This trend started way back when UE started to be a more general tool for arch viz, then for films and virtual production stuff and now it's been used pretty much for everything. I don't have anything against that one software can be used to handle different use cases but at the same time I don't like how simple things can break because of that aim and all this hype. 

This is my opinion about UE5 in the battle so to speak and I’m sure most of the users are having a good time with it. It just depends on the usage really. It would be nice to have a more optimistic viewpoint but unfortunately, I've seen way too many bugs, issues and experienced crashes that I'm going to keep my expectations low from now on.

Unreal Engine 5 in media

Another aspect worth looking into is the way the media shares news that are related to UE5. It pretty much started right after the first Unreal Engine 5 tech demo video and since then, it has only grown larger. Right now, we can see headlines that usually follow this common pattern: “See how this (old_game) looks in Unreal Engine 5” or “Fan recreated this (old_game) in Unreal Engine 5”. Most of the time those results are not even that good looking when considering that older games needed to run well using the hardware from that era, but these fan creations can just focus on one, narrow area like visuals, not performance, game mechanics etc. Maybe I’m just missing the point here but most of the time I feel that those kinds of news and articles are just eating space from more interesting news that actually have some point to them.

I understand that it’s very easy to get clicks with these kinds of “news” and articles. I also fully understand that people like to recreate things they also like to consume like movies, games, and books. Fan art is a huge area that ranges from basic sketches to much larger projects that can actually even look interesting. I don’t personally really care that much about fan art, but I understand that journalists are not usually that tech savvy when it comes to game engines so it’s very easy to write news about these fan creations. That’s a fast way for journalists to cover this topic and Unreal community is also constantly producing huge amount of “free news” content with varying quality. There are always fans who created his or her favorite scene from a game or movie X and apparently there is always a news site that covers it.

Another thing that the media is doing is it tries to show only one side of things. Usually, it asks certain people to share their opinions about topic X and these people are also usually standing on the same side with their opinions. This is true pretty much with everything in media nowadays but it’s striking with this topic too. It tries to use the existing hype and boost it even more by promising that the future will be full of epic games (pun intended) that anyone can make. Reading those articles really makes me wondering are people using a totally different UE5 version that I’m using?

That also brings us to another issue that is a much larger topic, but I want to cover a bit from that here. Game development is not easy, really, it’s not. Sure, we have awesome tools and free assets to play around with so in theory anyone can make something regardless on the quality. Just like anyone can draw, play music or sing. That doesn’t mean that every drawing is newsworthy just like any asset flipped example project with a custom character is. This happened with the Epic Games’ free City Example project. People started to add some simple game mechanics there like flying with a Superman character model. Pretty soon gaming sites started to share news about this “new superman game”. After that someone made a Spiderman version of it. Then Batman, then Sonic and I also saw an Iron Man version few days ago. All of them are just focusing on small thing that doesn’t make it a game but more a simple game mechanic test built on top of an example environment, but it doesn’t stop sites from writing about it as a “game”. That will then fuel more and more users to make these simple tests and the loop goes around and around.

I might be overreacting here a bit, but I just wanted to illustrate my point better. I would like to see more objective articles and news because at this point, we all know that UE5 can produce awesome visuals. What about other things? That’s why I really like to watch and read what Digital Foundry has to say on these topics. At the end of the day things might look awesome, realistic and good but it’s a totally different topic how well everything runs and feels. You know, things that actually make video games interactive.

My honest opinion about Unreal Engine 5

So, to summarize my opinion, I really need to say it again that I’m not a huge fan of the fact that Unreal Engine 5 is so massive and contains tools, plugins, and features that you don’t really need for game development. I fully understand the reasons for this change and all the possibilities of how different industries can utilize the Unreal Engine, but I think there should be a better way to handle this extra complexity. 

Like I previously mentioned, I've been using UE4 since the year 2016 pretty much daily. It has been a good, robust game engine that allowed me to make interesting things, even without Lumen and Nanite tech. Epic Games also took good care of its game dev community and it felt that both parties shared the same vision and passion for creating games. That’s why I could easily recommend Unreal Engine 4 to my fellow game dev friends. Don’t get me wrong, new features are nice to have but I feel that the current engine development is focusing way too much on these shiny new things and is spreading in so many new directions that I don’t feel that my vision aligns with Epic Games current plans anymore. I’m still going to use Unreal Engine but there are some new aspects that I don’t really like.

Epic Games expanded their focus with Unreal Engine 5 to cover lots of different use cases from games to virtual productions and films and unfortunately, it feels that this new, larger scope also means that there will be more bugs and issues with basic features that anyone should trust to work when making games. That’s why I would like to see Epic Games focusing much more on the actual QA testing for future releases and not just focusing on adding new features while keeping rest of systems in experimental or beta stage.

Because of that, I’m still using Unreal Engine 4 for a few game projects that I’m currently working on. I think that Unreal Engine 5 still needs some time to mature a bit. Hopefully during that time Epic Games can also expand the use of Nanite and optimize Lumen more. 

I can see a huge potential with Unreal Engine 5 and in terms of computer graphics, it really turns a totally new page. I can really appreciate the hard work they have put into these new technologies that are removing some walls that were previously there. It’s kind of humbling to think that anyone can download this piece of software for free. Looking back at those early UDK/UE3 days, I can still see how Epic Games is continuing its chosen path to give more power to artists like me and you. I just hope Epic Games always remember its roots and other game developers.