Since its announcement in May 2020,Unreal Engine 5 has earned a place of honor among the most promising engines in the industrystimulating the audience’s imagination about the technological future of the medium.
Titles like Hellblade 2 (here’s our review of Hellblade 2) or Tekken 8 have already made the potential of the engine more than clear, without considering the avalanche of tech demos that pour into the internet at a regular rate. Just recently, one of these caught our attention and we therefore took the opportunity to return to say a few words on Epic’s creature.
A forgotten cemetery
Forgotten Cemetery is set within a setting that is as desolate as it is evocative: a Gothic necropolis full of details and ruined mausoleums. Among eerie paths, crooked gravestones and twisted trees, this short digital excursion does a good job of showcasing some of the key features of the Unreal Engine, especially regarding the Lumen global illumination system, which gives the scene a pleasantly ghostly without compromising the naturalness of a fresco which, thanks to Nanite, deploys a large number of very high quality graphic assets, created with photogrammetry and modeled by the Scans Factory team.
To complete this sinister picture we find a good use of volumetric effects, especially in relation to light diffusion. The excellent rendering of the materials goes hand in hand with a more than credible representation of reflections and light interference: all things that more or less represent the standard of scenarios created with Unreal Engine 5.
Moving on to the indisputable “heaviness” of the demo in question, even on rather impressive configurations, It is important to specify that the digital tour created by Scans Factory has no playful ambitions: the basic idea is to showcase the assets created by the studio, show their qualities and sell the relevant package. For this reason it makes little sense to use the demo as a litmus test of the engine’s flexibility, much less its performance solidity in the context of videogame production, given that the entire operation was conceived with a different purpose.
On the other hand, the evident lack of advanced features and graphics options speaks for itself, like the rigidity of the few animations and a somewhat misguided management of global lighting in the night scenario, probably to avoid occluding the visibility of the graphic assets too much. Although the demo documentation talks about optimization and scalability, taking a look at the in-engine presets it is clear how these two aspects were treated with relative superficiality by the team, which as mentioned had other priorities.
If it is clear that Unreal Engine 5 is still a young engine, with ample room for improvement and a large range of tools that are anything but mature, demos like Forgotten Cemetery should not be considered representative of the malleability of Epic’s technology, if only for what concerns the performance area.
Creating a game is a long, complex, and layered process, which generally requires developers to do painstaking work on customizing the engines used, and therefore these demos always have a relative value in concretely defining the virtues of the various technologies. In short, net of the potential of Unreal Engine 5, we are quite certain that its value has yet to manifest itself, and that it will probably be necessary to wait some time before being able to weigh it properly.
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