Epic Games has unveiled Unreal Engine 5 with a stunning tech demo running on the upcoming PlayStation 5.
The demo was hosted by Brian Karis, Epic’s technical director of graphics, and Jerome Platteaux, art director of special objects.
One of the two key features that Unreal Engine 5 brings to the table is a system called Lumen, which provides “dynamic global illumination” and “beautiful bounce lighting, instantaneously” Karis said.
“I don’t have to be constrained to do a world where the game has to be static,” Platteaux added, “and I’m able to iterate it a lot faster.”
The other big feature is “truly virtualized geometry.”
“The artists wouldn’t have to be concerned over poly counts, draw calls, or memory” Karis explained. “We could directly use film-quality assets and bring them straight into the engine.”
To demonstrate the power of these new features, Karis and Platteaux ran through a demo called Lumen in the Land of Nanite, which begins with a young girl spelunking through some gorgeous caves.
Karis pointed out there were “over a billion triangles of source geometry in each frame,” giving every rock in the cave an astounding level of detail.
As the player character explores the cave, the demo also shows off the engine’s acoustics, including reverb that emulates what one would hear in real-life spaces.
The rest of the demo shows off the uncannily lifelike animations as the player character climbs a rock wall, explores an ancient temple, and flies out of a collapsing city. It’s a stunning showcase of the new technology, and if game developers can harness its potential, the next generation of games will look mighty great.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.