The DeanBeat: Now the next generation games are getting closer

With the unveiling of Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5 demo on Wednesday, it finally feels like the next generation of games is getting palpable. It’s close. The graphics that Epic showed off in The Valley of the Ancient demo were quite spectacular, and they’re a reminder of what Epic does for the industry besides suing Apple for antitrust concerns.

Epic will make the demo and its assets — which includes captured data of the fine details of the red rock formations near Moab, Utah — available to all Unreal Engine 5 users. Graphics that look that good are going to be the baseline for creating a next-generation game, and a number of companies (like Frost Giant Studios, a real-time strategy game dev house that ex-Blizzard devs started) have stepped up to say they’re using the engine for their upcoming games. This isn’t going to be technology that we’ll see used in a handful of titles. This engine should inspire a whole generation of games that we’ve never seen before.