Unreal Engine 5: Nanite and Quixel Megascans Blur the Line Between Indie and AAA Development

With the introduction of Unreal Engine 5, the Unreal ecosystem will soon blur the lines between indie startups and AAA titans. Welcome to the first video in a 3-part series, in which we'll explore why you should be excited about the future of next-gen games. In this video, we'll dive into how developers both big and small will now have access to cutting edge, accessible, and free tools that will allow them to craft higher fidelity worlds than ever before.

IGN sat down with Brian Karis (Epic Games), Teddy Bergsman (Epic Games), and Nate Purkeypile (The Axis Unseen) to discuss how Unreal Engine 5's Nanite and Quixel Megascans streamline the development process for teams of any size.

Stay tuned for our two follow up vides centered around Unreal Engine 5's Lumen Global Illumination tool and how MetaHuman Creator allows for the creation of lifelike characters.

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[Jo_Rogan]

cant wait for AAA devs to use this and still make something unfinished

[sean]

the guys who make these features are geniuses

[RoCkShaDoWWaLkEr]

Developing in UE5 and working with Megascans/Nanite is absolutely mind blowing, just the experience alone is exciting enough to make the learning process enjoyable.

[justpurkeygames]

Hope you all like the video! It was cool to talk about how useful this stuff is for making The Axis Unseen. It's a huge time saver for sure. It's nice as a solo dev to leverage this stuff to spend more time on what makes my game unique instead.

[KindOldRaven]

It's incredibly impressive. Having said that, the Unreal 3 engine demos where impressive to the point that I've barely seen Unreal 4 games of an entire generation later get close to what was shown for the previous engine. So let's see what happens in actual games ;p

[joshuazamora]

That’s awesome since now it will be more about the storytelling these games can do which will allow some indie developers to really rise to the top

[TheMentalHealthHelper]

Can't wait for this new technology to grow and be used by more teams and gaming studios. its going to be an interesting generation. 💯

[mysticaljp]

Beautiful, excited for the future of gaming!

[sebastianblatter]

2:25 but what about the mb size of the mesh? If you work like this, arent games super huge for no reason?

[Dexxter_slav]

Finally we will get games we deserve. In indie studios we trust

[joshjoshjoshjoshjoshjoshj]

This is so game changing it’s hard to comprehend rn

[Matt-bgwg]

A Plague Tale was an excellent example of QUIXEL Megascans absolutely blowing the doors off

[craysheet]

Schrodinger's graphics - they're rendered and not rendered at the same time

[willieko]

Great series so far! Would love to see more behind-the-scene content

[eleesium]

Yeah we see this but what about performance?

[dinomightstudios]

Now that the visuals are going to be easier to produce at a lower cost, companies and small studios can now focus their budget on the actual storytelling and world building! 🙌🏾

[bobbyb]

What is the job role of the people that film, take pics of locations for the engine called?

[fourthpanda]

It still doesn't run any magnitudes better though. To really see a scene that detailed in a game and play in it, your PC is still gotta be juiced.

[quamb]

I'd be interested if IGN did more reporting on this, not just a fluff piece... What are the implications for other engines? Unity for example... is it DOA, or are they too looking at releasing similar innovations? What about studios that don't use Unreal like Naughty Dog, Rockstar, Nintendo etc? Are their new game projects starting from a backfoot?

[socks]

is it not going to end up with games being 1tb in file size though?