After a long early access period of nearly a year, Epic Games has officially released Unreal Engine 5, a powerful game development engine and the foundation for many future blockbusters. You can download Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) from the project’s official website, and the tool is free for everyone.
In addition to opening UE5 to all developers, Epic Games has released two sample projects, showcasing the superior capabilities of the now-completed engine.
“Lyra Starter Game is a sample gameplay project, developed alongside UE5 to serve as a starting point for creating new games, as well as providing research documentation on game development,” an Epic representative said. “We intend to continue updating this project with new versions in the future, showcasing our latest refinements.”
The second project, named City Sample, is the virtual city model that appeared in the technology demo “The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine Experience” released not long ago.
According to Epic, City Sample includes a complete city with houses, vehicles, and virtual NPCs called MetaHuman. This will be a demonstration showing how realistic open-world games using Unreal Engine 5 can be.
Within today, Epic will also update more UE5-compatible content, both free and paid, to the Unreal Marketplace. Developers will be able to immediately start working on their dream projects.
Many large studios have already used Unreal Engine 5 as their “foundation.” Most recently, we witnessed CD Projekt signing a 15-year strategic partnership with Epic, while simultaneously announcing that the new Witcher game will use Unreal Engine 5. Just yesterday, Crystal Dynamics confirmed that the next Tomb Raider game will also use the new engine.
Prior to Epic’s official release of UE5, many game projects had already decided to leverage the power of the new engine. The game Wukong: Black Myth, which was making waves a while ago, will also be developed on Unreal Engine 5.
Unreal Engine 5 allows you to deploy projects on PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Google Stadia, macOS, iOS, Android, ARKit, ARCore, OpenXR, SteamVR, Oculus, Linux, and SteamDeck. You can run Unreal Editor on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Source: Genk
