Hey All,
We've been working hard behind the scenes for the last few months alongside our normal development work and we'd like to share that with you! This has been taking up a lot of our time and we've been keeping it a mystery but a few people have already guessed; we're in the process of moving to Unreal Engine 5.
Initially we avoided announcing this as we decided to not make the move if it increased the development time of the project. What we've discovered is that we're actually able to reduce overall development time due to efficiencies in our pipeline thanks to Nanite.
In the image above you can see approximately the same development time applied on both the left and right. Whilst the pillars on the right are still a little work-in-progress, we're able to build a far more richly detailed world in the same amount of time. We're also able to drastically reduce the texture budget, lowering the impact of the game on GPUs with less VRAM.
The fidelity we've been able to achieve is honestly incredible. We're so impressed with the updated engine that we couldn't justify continuing solely in UE4. Despite our initial cynicism, UE5 has won us over. That isn't to say it's without problems, which is why we're running the versions in parallel until we're at Alpha, but the risks are far outweighed by the benefits.
We've been rescaling our world map to take advantage of the new optimisation features of UE5, resulting in a playable area nine times the size of our current world map (not just the current playable area, the whole map). Wait, I hear you scream, it'll be an unplayable walking simulator! Fear not. In the UE5 build we now have working prototypes of sailing and riding, as well as an early version of transformation into an exotic form.
So, what's the difference and how soon can you expect to get your hands on the UE5 version? I think the above image speaks for itself. We haven't yet finalised our small props kit, so the UE5 version is missing the crates, barrels, ropes, and other details that help finalise a scene, yet it's already far more detailed than the UE4 version.
In terms of becoming playable we've made some significant progress in that direction, enough that the roadmap isn't particularly accurate, and we're gradually approaching what we consider an Alpha build of CI. Once we have all major systems working in the UE5 build, we'll push it live and keep the UE4 as legacy. We will likely make use of the Steam Branch system to allow access to both builds until UE5 is a true replacement to the UE4 version.
We hope you're as excited as we are for the incredible boost towards true AAA quality that we've managed to make with the upgrade to the game engine. I want to thank every one of you so much for your amazing support; the game is now almost unrecognisable from where it began and it's entirely thanks to your help.