State of Unreal: Everything announced for Unreal Engine, Fortnite

Epic Games has shown off the future of its powerful Unreal Engine, including a first glimpse at Amy Hennig’s Captain America and Black Panther game, and closer integration of the eye-catching MetaHumans tech into UEN, during this year’s annual State of Unreal broadcast by the company.

The show’s highlight was its peek at Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra, Hennig’s highly-anticipated World War 2 superhero game, which is built in Unreal Engine and shows off its latest features – including improved Nanite tesselation to make high-quality 3D geometry more memory efficient, and photo-realistic character animation using MetaHumans.

A preview build of Unreal Engine 5.4 launches today, ahead of its full release in late April. This adds Motion Matching that allows for simple AAA-quality character animation. Epic also demonstrated how Fortnite creators will be able to build custom Lego and Rocket Racing mini-games.

UEFN – the Unreal Engine-powered editor to build experiences and launch them within Fortnite – is now compatible with MetaHuman. A cool-looking demo named Talisman showed off how it all looks – and how UEFN can create realistic environments and people, very different to Fortnite’s stylised battle royale modes. A key advance here is that optimisation of MetaHuman data can shrink its realistic character models down from almost 1GB in size to around 60MB.