The Unreal Engine is a staple of game development, and one of Epic Games' biggest assets outside of Fortnite. A powerful and available tool for developers, both indie and AAA, Unreal Engine is used for everything from videos to games, including fan remakes of older games.
The newest, upcoming version of Unreal Engine is Unreal Engine 5. While not officially released in full capacity, Unreal Engine 5 does currently have an Early Access feature, similar to Early Access titles on Steam. There's a lot that Early Access brings to developers' hands, with all the previous Unreal Engine functionality, plus new tools for more realistic graphics than ever.
While there is a demo project titled Valley of the Ancients for Unreal Engine 5, developers have already begun to create their own projects and experiments using the Engine. One intrepid experimenter created an entire birch forest in Unreal Engine 5's Early Access. The Forest is photorealistic in the extreme, with trees that look real enough to be reached out and touched. Fallen branches and leaves litter the ground. Finally, the lighting shines down gently, with shadows of leaves from the trees clearly visible all over the floor.
This is not the first Unreal Engine 5 Early Access project to draw acclaim. One developer stress tested the Engine by recreating his sleeping dog 1000 times, which put next to no stress on the Engine in the end. The forest seems to prove that extremely realistic environments can be made with the Engine, and what's more, it seems they can be made with relative ease. The new Nanite feature is most to thank for this, as it can replicate a truly absurd number of polygons from photoscanned images. As a result, absurdly real looking objects, like the trees and forest floor, can be rendered without major quality loss.
Of course, there are still elements that need to be tested in Unreal Engine 5. While it can definitely render realistic looking objects well, it's uncertain how good it can make non photo-realistic objects or entities look. Unreal Engine 5 is the planned engine for Dragon Quest 12, which will be the proving ground for its cartoon rendering ability.
The possibilities are certainly exciting, for both large-scale and smaller scale projects. Unreal Engine 5 is also the engine of choice for Frost Giant and Dreamhaven's joint RTS project, a game that should have any classic RTS fan drooling. With these three elements combined, it could well be the best playing and looking RTS game in years.