After an early access period lasting nearly a year, Epic Games has officially released Unreal Engine 5, a powerful game development tool and the foundation for many future blockbusters. You can download Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) from the project's homepage, and the engine is free for everyone.
Alongside opening UE5 to all developers, Epic Games is releasing two sample projects that show off what the now-finished engine can do.
“Lyra Starter Game is a sample gameplay project, developed alongside UE5 to serve as a starting point for building new games, and as a reference for learning how games are made,” an Epic representative said. “We plan to keep updating this project with new versions in the future, showcasing our latest refinements.”
The second project is called City Sample, the virtual city model that appeared in the recently announced tech demo The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine Experience.
According to Epic, City Sample includes a complete city with buildings, vehicles and virtual NPCs called MetaHuman. It is meant to show just how realistic an open-world game built on Unreal Engine 5 can be.
Later today, Epic will also add more UE5-compatible content, both free and paid, to the Unreal Marketplace. Developers will be able to start working on their dream projects right away.
Quite a few major studios are already using Unreal Engine 5 as their foundation. Most recently, CD Projekt signed a 15-year strategic partnership with Epic and announced 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.
Even before Epic's official UE5 launch, many game projects had already decided to take advantage of the new engine's power. Black Myth: Wukong, which made a huge splash a while back, will also be built on Unreal Engine 5.
Unreal Engine 5 lets you deploy projects on PCs, 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 Steam Deck. You can run Unreal Editor on Windows, macOS and Linux.
Source: Genk
