One of the hot topics about marketing, PR, and other bussiness stuff is how to "control the narrative". When you're in control, you're essentially a step ahead of everybody.
Epic is on beast mode right now, they're at the controls!
Lets recap what they are up to on only five months:
- They're challenging Apple on the courts
- They just purchased Artstation, the most important artist portfolio showcase platform
- They released Unreal Engine 5 , the next major version of its real time visualization engine
Now, the last bullet is the one I want to discuss. I'll not going deep on technicals here, but some disgression would be considered for the sake of clarity. To me it's very perplexing how a highly technical event is wrapped on such layer of emotion and hype. Reminded me the feelings of being gifted with a computer being a child. I didn't knew a thing about Basic, or RAM. But that was so exciting..
What Epic did last week is gift us a glimpse on how the worlds can be potentially emulated breaking some walls that were well stablished. The two bright stars of the show: Lumen and Nanite. Two new lightning and geometry handling technologies aiming for a high degree of photorealism.
80 million tris, butter smooth. Mesh by Nika Zautashvili
I've devoured the oficial documentation about these two toys, and I've still some doubts about good practices and potential new workflows. And, of course, some of the classic workflows just went tagged with a big "deprecated" label. One thing if for sure: This feels "next generation" if that makes sense.
Community reaction is passionate!
What an explosive cocktail of newcomers feeling atracted, loads of weird experiments and youtube stuff about the new engine, doubts and anxiety for FOMO'ing this "historic" chance to be part of something bigger.. that's the hype train at full throttle.
Let me breath!
Make no mistake!, all that jazz will come at a cost! First of all, someone could think that being able to handle raytracing and million of polygons without a hitch makes the engine lightweight. Let me tell you something: the showcased project (ancient valley) worth 100GB of SSD grade storage. Basically you have to defeat a juggernaut in the demo, but that requires 5 minutes of gameplay only. Take a look at the "minimun" editor requirements. The specs belongs to a top tier PC currently north 2k$
Now, if you're planning to make a bigger game with the new features using 3d scanned assets.. mind on 500 - 600 GB (or more!) of storage. Is your project good enought to justify this ammount on your players's storage? not mentioning the lack of support of lots of current gaming devices: mobile, nintendo switch, intel graphics cards..
I'm not advocating for return to the stone age. But I don't take decisions when the dust is not settled yet. Remember that there are massive amount of press and PR work behind to make you act quickly. I'd say we need almost one year and a half to start adopting the engine on a substantial amount, if not more.
But at the end of the day, we're all on this mice wheel running. Following that analogy, you need to run just the exact ammount to not be in the head and burn out rather quickly, and not be so slow to be expelled from the wheel.
And there are competitors that will not stay quite for so long.
One thing is sure: the videogames we will enjoy next years will be awesome and ridiculously beautiful and detailed, thanks to people that push the boundaries on such strong way.
What a time to be alive!