Unreal Engine is the graphics engine created by Epic Games and the majority of AAA titles in the industry are developed on it.
Foto: Unreal Engine
Listen to this article
Audio generated with Google AI
When the Gaming industry talks about graphics engines, it refers to a development environment made up of tools (hardware and software) necessary for the creation of video games. In general terms, a graphics engine’s main task is to render (generate images) in 2D and 3D; that follow rules of movement, collision and physics according to the nature of the objects represented in the game.
This not only allows animations to look the way they do, but also makes it possible to manage a title’s internal storage and artificial intelligence behavior patterns. However, the term “graphics engine” was not born in tandem with this market, but first appeared in the 1990s, when deliveries began to integrate 3D graphics.
However, the first 3D video game engine in the world was Freescape Engine., in 1986, owned by Incentive Software. Since then Source Engine, Unity 5, Unreal Engine 4 and CryENGINE are the most common graphics engines and those that have made some of the most popular video games possible, but diversity in graphics engines is increasingly scarce in the developer business. .
That is why it is increasingly common that developers, in order to reduce production costs, prefer to reuse or adapt the same engine to create different games. The presence, almost alone on the market, of Unreal Engine 5, the graphics engine created by Epic Games, the same creators of Fortniteis changing the landscape for developers, manufacturers and even players.
Unreal Engine 5
Its last update is from April 2022 and although it was initially designed only for first-person shooters (FPS) in 1998, it has been enormously successful for the development of games in other genres. Its code written in C++ makes it extremely friendly for most studies.
Even though there are still great titles like GTA V o EA Sports FC 25 that make their own graphics engines, and it doesn’t seem like that’s going to change in the short term, Unreal Engine 5 increasingly has a larger market share. The most recent and clear example is Halowhich left behind its Slipspace Engine graphics engine, created by Microsoft Gaming, to use that of Epic Games.
Although it is not official, this responds to the need for Xbox Game Studios to begin to open its great exclusives to its direct competition, PlayStation. In addition to being more compatible with PS5 and PS5 Pro consoles, Unreal Engine 5 allows you to Halo be available for PC gamers.
Will exclusives end in video games?
This is another of the palpable trends in the industry, since Xbox exclusives are not the only ones that have migrated to other platforms. Spider-Man 2 y God of War: Ragnarokvaluable IP’s from Sony, have recently been released for computers, which makes them lose their status as exclusive to PlayStation consoles, not to mention that intergenerational titles are becoming more and more common.
Before all this, large companies spared no expense in developing a graphics engine that will give you the opportunity to adapt it to your personal needs. However, now, as everyone or almost everyone uses Unreal Engine 5, it is a feature that is no longer so important for making games.
However, the fact that most deliveries have the same engine does not allow for technological innovation, since own engines adapted to each proposal or console provide a competitive advantage in the market. This takes each system to its performance limit, something that does not happen in the current generation, since not having its own engine, the real capacity of each console cannot be known.
Is it profitable to create your own graphics engine?
This is one of the reasons why large companies have given up on having their own engine, since according to estimates by the Square Enix and Rockstar Games studio, it can cost between US$100 and 150 million. The same thing that earned PlayStation the development of Concorda game that was removed from the market after just two weeks.
Additionally, the creation of a graphics engine can take four to 10 years, a very long period of time in which setbacks can also arise. This goes against the grain of an industry that is increasingly less tolerant of major failures and tries to tread on safe ground.
However, the homogenization of graphics engines, and therefore development processes, distorts the competition of studios and manufacturers, depriving gamers of innovations in terms of gameplay, narratives, native rates of frames per second (FPS) and other graphic aspects. .
What other games will migrate to Unreal Engine 5?
The widespread use of Unreal Engine 5 also presents advantages for the industry, since its easy accessibility, its high portability with almost any platform and wide presence in AAA video games reduces development times and makes the work of programmers more flexible.
At the moment, apart from the new remake of Haloscheduled for 2026, there are three other studios that will leave behind their own graphics engine. CD Projeckt Red says goodbye to REDengine for the development of its next title belonging to the saga of The Witcher.
Square Enix ends its work with Luminous Engine and prepares the remake of Final Fantasy VII with the help of Unreal Engine 5. Finally, Crystal Dynamics will do the same with its Foundation Engine for the next installment of its franchise of Tomb Raider. Without a doubt, practices that will become more common over time.
