Epic Games has shown off the future of its powerful Unreal Engine, including a first glimpse at Amy Hennig’s Captain America and Black Panther game, and closer integration of the eye-catching MetaHumans tech into UEN, during this year’s annual State of Unreal broadcast by the company.
The show’s highlight was its peek at Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra, Hennig’s highly-anticipated World War 2 superhero game, which is built in Unreal Engine and shows off its latest features – including improved Nanite tesselation to make high-quality 3D geometry more memory efficient, and photo-realistic character animation using MetaHumans.
A preview build of Unreal Engine 5.4 launches today, ahead of its full release in late April. This adds Motion Matching that allows for simple AAA-quality character animation. Epic also demonstrated how Fortnite creators will be able to build custom Lego and Rocket Racing mini-games.
Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra | Story Trailer
UEFN – the Unreal Engine-powered editor to build experiences and launch them within Fortnite – is now compatible with MetaHuman. A cool-looking demo named Talisman showed off how it all looks – and how UEFN can create realistic environments and people, very different to Fortnite’s stylised battle royale modes. A key advance here is that optimisation of MetaHuman data can shrink its realistic character models down from almost 1GB in size to around 60MB.
More than 80,000 UEFN experiences have now been published in Fortnite, which have been played by 130 million players. In the past year, Epic has seen UEFN publishing grow from less than 50 experiences released per day, to more than 500 arrive daily. This has resulted in payouts totalling $320m for creators over the past 12 months.
Lego, Rocket Racing and (coming later in May) Fall Guys elements are also being added to UEFN, allowing creators to build their own Lego mini-games, racing tracks and Fall Guys levels, and launch them in Fortnite.
Three new Lego Islands made by Lego itself are also launching within Fortnite today, including the self-explanatory Prop Hunt, a Ninjago samurai Battle Arena and a mini adventure game, Cat Island Aventure. Yet more Lego Islands are on the way in the future, too.
Other upcoming UEFN additions include a first-person camera mode, and a powerful-looking physics sandbox option – inspired by those destructible Lego levels. Significantly, Epic will develop future battle royale seasons using UEFN itself, beginning in 2025.
800 film and TV projects have now used Unreal Engine, Epic says – a 45 percent increase on the same figure from last year.
You can rewatch State of Unreal 2024 in full via the video below:
State of Unreal Livestream | GDC 2024
