With Epic Games unveiling the potential and power of Unreal Engine 5 on the PlayStation 5 yesterday evening, tech enthusiasts all over have been wondering out loud what could be achieved with such a monumentally gorgeous engine. Imagine the near photo-realistic depictions of characters and environments? The advanced levels of lighting and particle effects! The physics! Think of the physics!
Yet while everyone has no doubt been blown away by Epic Games’ latest iteration of its vastly influential tech, one has to wonder…what about Fortnite? Emphasis on the “has to” because while I personally care little for Fortnite it’s interesting to speculate how the reveal of Epic’s latest engine may affect their most successful game to date, especially moving into a new generation of hardware.
Fortnite fans have little to worry about it seems, as a blog post on the official Unreal Engine site revealed that Fortnite will indeed be a launch title across multiple next-gen platforms, which basically just means the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X right now. The post goes on to describes plenty of the technical details surrounding Unreal Engine 5 but the nugget of information we found most interesting is that the new engine will allow forward compatibility with games developed in Unreal Engine 4, meaning that developers will easily be able to transfer games made in the older engine to the more modern version. I say easily, but it’ll probably be a little tricky. Yet easier than if that feature wasn’t present!
What this means is that Fortnite will eventually make the jump to UE5, as confirmed by the very same blog post.
We will release Fortnite, built with UE4, on next-gen consoles at launch and, in keeping with our commitment to prove out industry-leading features through internal production, migrate the game to UE5 in mid-2021.
So Fortnite fans have nothing to fear as their beloved shooter will certainly survive the transition to next-gen and probably received a graphical overhaul in the near future.
Last Updated: May 14, 2020
Pariah
May 14, 2020 at 11:06
Fortnite’s art style doesn’t really scream “high fidelity 8k texture beauty”, but sure. We’ve seen what RTX did to Minecraft, let’s see what it can do to this.