We're starting to see what developers can do with Epic's new Unreal Engine 5, which was made available for early access last May. Epic promises an engine designed for next-gen hardware able to create fully dynamic global lighting and textures at up to 8k resolutions, pushing game graphics ever closer to what we'd see with our own eyes in the real world.
The Coalition has always worked with Epic's Unreal Engine, having been under Epic's umbrella of studios until its purchase by Microsoft in 2014. The Gears of War developer showcased what it can do with Unreal Engine 5 at last week's Game Developers Conference with a tech demo it calls Alpha Point.
Although just a minute long, Alpha Point reveals incredible dynamic lighting and next-gen textures. It starts out in an ancient ruin very similar to Epic's "Lumen in the land of Nanite" tech demo from last year, but then it veers off into its own thing with a floating trapezoid that eventually glows bright enough to blind the camera.
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On top of that, The Coalition also posted a video of Unreal Engine 5's character modeling capabilities, likely done with the help of MetaHuman although it's not mentioned anywhere in the video. The male character looks like he could be straight out of a Gears of War game with very similar armor, although not nearly as jacked as most soldiers from the Gears series.
Rumors have swirled in the lead-up to GDC that Alpha Point was actually a brand new IP coming from The Coalition, although the demo video itself certainly didn't present enough to consider it an IP. That said, a full game with the same name might still be under development, with GamesBeat's Jeff Grubb said that will be "an experiment to mess with Unreal Engine 5, it's gonna be smaller. It'll still take some time but it's gonna be a small offshoot that doesn't involve necessarily Gears."
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