Gears of War developers The Coalition is bringing an Unreal Engine 5 demo to GDC, titled Alpha Point.
The showcase has been added to the official GDC schedule and will be showcased on July 20 at 1:20 pm PT. It's listed as "Unlocking Artist Potential" on the schedule, although the contents of the demo aren't yet known.
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According to the official description of the event, it will focus on, "learnings the team had while creating Nanite-resolution assets and incorporating them into a fully real-time lighting scenario with Lumen and Virtual Shadow Maps".
The talk will also dive into, "Performance and memory observations will be covered for Xbox Series X and S, as well as VFX, Blueprint, material setup, Temporal Super Resolution, and Virtual Texture findings".
The most interesting part of the presentation that might be a real showcase for the future of The Coalition's games is, "some preliminary findings on next-gen character creation and MetaHumans integration, demoing a next-generation character test running on Xbox Series X", which should give us a good idea of how characters will eventually look.
In case the extremely technical language didn't make it clear, GDC talks are always very interesting, but they're focused on the process of development rather than the games themselves. Don't go into this expecting any kind of announcement from The Coalition, and don't go thinking that Alpha Point will
The Coalition recently announced that it was moving into current-generation development and would be using Unreal Engine 5 for its future titles. This talk will likely showcase some of its early findings as it moves forward with the engine. The Coalition also confirmed that it "will not be announcing any new projects or titles for some time", so maybe don't go expecting a new Gears for some time.
We've seen a few showcases of Unreal Engine 5 so far, including the now playable "Valley of the Ancients" demo. Its massive number of polygons, or triangles as they're referred to in the reveal trailer, was quite impressive so seeing more from one of Xbox's most graphically tuned studios should be interesting.
