Are you ready for even bigger games? In a recent interview (via Wccftech) regarding Epic Games’s well-received Unreal Engine 5, Kitatus and Friends CEO/Lead Programmer Ryan Shah expressed his belief that next-generation titles will be even more massive due to the technology and fidelity that UE5 grants developers.
“It looks absolutely fantastic,” Shah begins, praising the engine. “Especially the Nanite system for a start, I had to scoop my jaw up off the floor after that.” But then he goes into the double-edged nature of the new toolset.
“It takes a lot of the headache out of asset creation, but at the same time, it starts to raise more concerns,” Shah warned. “And one of the examples is Call of Duty: Warzone at the minute, as people are harassing Activision over the size of Call of Duty: Warzone. And I think when we’ve got technologies now in the Unreal Engine 5 that allow us to use the original source meshes, with the original source textures and everything like that, the game file sizes are going to have to skyrocket which presents a unique set of challenges.”
“It was a very interesting presentation. What’s more exciting than anything is that not all of the features, but a lot of the features are available in some form in Unreal Engine 4 as it stands. Like the particle system is already actively available to us now, even in a rough state, which has been fantastic for us, because this means when Unreal Engine 5 eventually launches, we’ve got the power to take what we’ve made now and kind of bring it up there instead of having to remake a game from scratch or make some serious porting adjustments. It will be hopefully relatively seamless to really tap the full potential.”
Shah’s prediction could be baloney, but at the same time, developers have proven that they care little about ridiculous, 150 GB+ file sizes, which makes this a scary proposition for those of us who have transitioned to SSDs and only want to keep our libraries to a single drive. It’s also bad news for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, which will be sold with relatively paltry 825 GB and 1 TB drives, respectively. (Obviously, there will be external solutions, but who wants to spend even more money?)