Engine News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

Epic Games has announced its pricing for the use of Unreal Engine by non-game creators, who will now typically pay $1850 a head each year to use the powerful development software.

Game development is, in some ways, more accessible than ever. Between the ease-of-use of engines like RPG Maker to the release of titles like Game Builder Garage that gamify the act of development itself, there are countless ways into game development that do not require previous experience of coding or design.

Epic Games has announced new pricing for its Unreal Engine for developers outside the gaming industry.

Epic Games has detailed its upcoming pricing changes for Unreal Engine, and in doing so has kept its promise to keep the situation the same for game developers.

MultiVersus will officially return on May 28.

To celebrate its upcoming seventh anniversary, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has released its 2024 roadmap, with huge features on the way, including destructible environments and a new game engine. The new list of features promises to make PUBG feel like a totally fresh experience all over again, even for veteran players.

It's been nearly seven years since PUBG: Battlegrounds took the gaming world by storm, effectively igniting the Battle Royale craze that would have dominated online games for years and inspiring a series of copycats. Just a few months ago, KRAFTON finally settled a long-standing lawsuit against NetEase's Knives Out.

PUBG is set to get several new features throughout 2024 that promise to change the game significantly.

Hogwarts Legacy 2 will likely be powered by the Unreal Engine 5, judging from a job ad from developer Avalanche Software.

A presentation for Dune: Awakening has explained why developer Funcom chose Unreal Engine 5 to craft its open-world survival MMO. The Dune: Awakening Direct comes shortly following the release of Dune: Part Two, the highly anticipated sequel to Denis Villeneuve's film adaptation of Frank Herbert's titular novel.

Hogwarts Legacy was a big release, and it gave fans of the Harry Potter franchise a new means to dive into this magical and wondrous world. For players that have gone through the game, we unfortunately don’t have any official announcement that a sequel is coming. While it is rather incredibly likely, given the amount of success this first game received, a discovery might point to the Hogwarts Legacy 2 game development being handled with Unreal Engine 5, if it does exist.

We already knew that Norwegian game developer Funcom is working on an open-world survival MMO game set in the Dune universe. And today, the developer has provided a new look at Dune: Awakening, including a glimpse into Arrakis along with some gameplay footage.

Ubisoft hasn’t yet revealed too many official details on Assassin’s Creed Codename Red (including a final title), the next mainline series in the company’s flagship franchise, though new information on the title continues to emerge through leaks. A new report published by Insider Gaming’s Tom Henderson has shed further light on the game.

Vampire Survivors received yet another update this past week. The Space-54 update adds two new characters, four new weapons, a new relic, and a new bonus stage. It also introduces cross-save support between Steam and Android to the Steam public beta branch.

The Unreal Engine 5.3 continues to impress, powering some amazing creations, such as a dune desert landscape showcased in a video shared online this week.

For developers just starting in the industry, the task of choosing the best game engine can be daunting. Here, we'll try to address many of the issues concerning one of the most popular game engines, GameMaker, so you can see if it's the right game engine for your project.

A stunning Uncharted Unreal Engine 5 imagining has been released, featuring cutscenes, platforming, combat, stealth, and vehicles.

Rainbow Six Siege's creative director Alexander Karpazis doesn't believe the elderly shooter needs a change of game engine or for that matter, a sequel. He feels that Siege can "last forever", adding that "I'm not going to name names, but you see games go through sequels and just completely drop the ball."

February 26, 2024, Dallas, TX –– Global technology company OnePlus launched its OnePlus Watch 2 during Mobile World Congress 2024 in Barcelona, Spain. The OnePlus Watch 2 is a stunning flagship smartwatch, and it utilizes the latest version of Wear OS by Google (Wear OS 4). The device features a unique Dual-Engine Architecture with two chipsets, Wear OS’s hybrid interface, market-leading battery life of up to 100 hours in full Smart Mode, and a premium build and design. The OnePlus Watch 2 represents a big step forward for the smartwatch market.

The Sims 4 has been around for quite a while now. Released in 2014, it seems Maxis and EA are further along with the next installment. While we can’t label it officially as The Sims 5, this next game release might have already leaked online. Reports are surfacing that players can gain access to the game for the PC and Android platforms. 

An opportunity went up in smoke for Apple when Microsoft pitched it to acquire its Bing search engine in 2018, according to court documents from Google’s antitrust lawsuit. However, the Cupertino giant passed on the chance to have its own search engine, reportedly believing that Bing was riddled with search quality issues. Microsoft has also attempted to persuade Apple to make its search engine default in the Safari web browser, but the company has been met with a similar response.

In spite of being nearly a decade old and having suffered quite a horrid start upon its launch all those years ago, Rainbow Six Siege has, over time, turned into one of the successful and widely played live service games out there.

An unofficial Grand Theft Auto San Andreas Unreal Engine 5 remaster was revealed with two gameplay videos showing Rockstar Games how it's done.

Helldivers 2 is the new must-play shooter in town, and it turns out the engine it was built on is already extinct. 

College football is going through some serious changes in 2024, and we’re not just talking about the playoff system. First off, the entire landscape of college football is shifting thanks to various conferences gaining new members, and some are basically shutting down entirely! RIP Pac 12! As if that’s not enough, some big-time coaches have retired, the “Transfer Portal” is consuming all sorts of players and then sending them to different places, which can totally affect how next year goes, and then, there’s the video game side of things! EA Sports College Football 25 will debut this year, and it appears as though EA Sports is taking the “easy road” with its construction.

PlayStation 5 and Steam hit Helldivers 2 was built on an engine that was discontinued after work on the game began.

CEO of Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead Game Studios, Johan Pilestedt, has taken to social media platform X (formerly Twitter) to reveal that the game was built using a now-obsolete game engine. The title was built using an old engine named Bitsquid—renamed to Stingray after its acquisition by Autodesk in 2014.

Boasting a dedicated fandom, the Shrek movies have been recreated in a number of video games, with one creative group now showcasing a trailer for what an open world Shrek game would look like in Unreal Engine 5. Fans have frequently recreated the iconic characters and locations fromShrekin Animal Crossing and other popular titles, but this short trailer gives audiences a glimpse at the potential of an Unreal production starring the green ogre.

A Tomb Raider fan, who's been unofficially remastering the first five games for the last eight years, has announced they worked on the official remastered trilogy. 

It was previously reported that Apple is planning to introduce AI-related features with the launch of iOS 18 and the iPhone 16 lineup. The company is currently working on various AI tools which could debut at the WWDC 2024 event in June. Prominent analyst Jeff Pu also stated that the iPhone 16 will be the company's first device to boast AI features coupled with iOS 18. It is now rumored that the iPhone 16 lineup will feature a significantly upgraded Neural Engine for generative AI features coming with iOS 18.

With Nintendo allegedly gearing up to reveal its next-generation console (and release it later in the year), first-party support for Switch is bound to continue slowing down, though we do still have some notable releases lined up. For instance, Princess Peach: Showtime! is out a little over a month from now, and though details about the game’s development are bafflingly scant – as is often the case with Nintendo titles – one particularly notable tidbit has seemingly emerged.

For developers just starting in the industry, the task of choosing the best game engine can be daunting. Here, we'll try to address many of the issues concerning one of the most popular game engines, Godot, so you can see if it's the right game engine for your project.

The power of the Unreal Engine 5 sometimes makes it difficult to distinguish between reality and digital recreation, as showcased in some impressive videos shared online.

There’s nothing better than a new game announcement – well maybe a new game release – but as we love to look to the horizon the latest title to appear on it is Dungeonborne, an extraction dungeon crawler made with Unreal Engine 5 and set in a gritty medieval world.

Silent Hill 4: The Room may not be as outdated as the previous entries in the series, but having been released almost 20 years ago, it would definitely do with a visual overhaul.

It’s pretty easy to stand out in the Virtual Boy catalog. There were only fourteen games. Half weren’t very good, half felt like tech demos, and half were Virtual Boy Wario Ware. If a game didn’t fit into any of those three halves, it stuck out like a missing tooth.

Blizzard Entertainment's survival game, which it informally announced in 2022, was reportedly canceled over engine issues during its six years of development, according to a new Bloomberg report. This report follows yesterday's news that Microsoft is laying off 1,900 employees across its Xbox, Activision Blizzard, and ZeniMax divisions. Alongside this news, Blizzard president Mike Ybarra also announced he was departing from the company, and we learned the aforementioned survival game had been canceled. 

Microsoft recently announced widespread layoffs, confirming that it was cutting 1,900 jobs across its entire gaming division– which, following the company’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, also includes Blizzard Entertainment. The layoffs have also gone hand-in-hand with the cancellation of Blizzard’s long-in-development survival game, codenamed Odyssey, which was officially confirmed to be in development in 2022, and a new report published by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier has shed more light on what brought about the highly anticipated project’s cancellation.

Striking Distance Studios, the developer that brought the world The Callisto Protocol, appears to be working on a new Unreal Engine 5 game and is currently hiring for its team. The developer behind the horror game formed in 2019, and The Callisto Protocol was its inaugural release. Though highly anticipated, the spiritual successor to Dead Space launched to mixed reviews and a generally poor reception, leaving the future of the studio in question.

Striking Distance Studios, the developer of The Callisto Protocol, has started development on its next project, as per a job ad published by the studio.

The developer behind The Callisto Protocol, Striking Distance Studios, is currently hiring for a new unannounced game running in Unreal Engine 5.

When Microsoft Corp. announced it was baking ChatGPT into its Bing search engine last February, bullish analysts declared the move an “iPhone moment” that could upend the search market and chip away at Google's dominance.

Vivaldi browser for iPhone and iPad launched just over a month ago, but it's already getting a big update with tab pinning, search engine shortcuts, bug fixes, and more. These features were already available on desktop and other platforms, and they're a welcome addition to Apple's mobile ecosystem.

Since it first entered open beta in 2013, Hi-Rez Studios’ multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game Smite has been a genre mainstay. Smite 2, a full-on sequel to that game, was announced today ahead of 2024’s Smite World Championship.

New gameplay footage showing the Unreal Engine 5-powered first-person shooter Instinction was shared online, providing the first proper look at the game.

Do you like trapping innocent, extinct animals in diabolical, broken worlds of your own devising, miring them in a purgatory of genre comparisions from which they may never escape? Because Ark: Survival Ascended developers Studio Wildcard and Grove Street Games are promising/threatening to "put the power of unbridled game creation directly in your hands" with the game's next major dev kit update, which will release by the end of January.

Wemade is at it again with a new fantasy MMORPG called Night Crows which has opened its pre-registration on the web, as well as on Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store. Similar to Wemade’s other properties, the game will feature blockchain technology, though it is primarily used as a monetization tool in this instance.

A new God of War Remake fan concept video within Unreal Engine 5 has been released, and we're sure that Kratos fans will appreciate it.

Hi-Rez Studios revealed Smite 2, the sequel to its third-person MOBA Smite, and confirmed that the upcoming title was built using Unreal Engine 5. Smite 2 was revealed nearly a decade after the full release of Smite, and Hi-Rez Studios answered a few questions that players had concerning how their efforts and unlocks from Smite would carry over into Smite 2.

A fan-made remake of Team Fortress 2 in the Source 2 engine has been cancelled after the ambitious project, three years in the making, ran into a double-whammy of recent development issues and a legal takedown from Valve.

Developer Titan Forge Games and publisher Hi-Rez Studios have announced Smite 2, a sequel to Smite that is rebuilding the third-person action MOBA from the ground up in Unreal Engine 5. There's no release date for the sequel, but Titan Forge Games says it's coming to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store. Closed early alpha testing will begin this spring. 

Today, Hi-Rez Studios has announced SMITE 2, the sequel to the popular free-to-play action MOBA game released ten years ago on PC before making the jump to consoles. Over 40 million users have played the game at some point, but now Hi-Rez is moving into the future.

Team Fortress: Source 2, an ambitious fan project aiming to rebuild the venerable Team Fortress 2 in the Source 2 engine, has reached the end of the road. Amper Software, the team behind the project, said on Twitter today that it's been forced to pull the plug after receiving a DMCA takedown notice from Valve.

Following its last couple of updates, Halo Infinite has enjoyed something of a turnaround (or a mini-turnaround, at least) in recent months, and though 343 Industries is obviously going to continue live service operations for the first-person shooter, it looks like the developer also has the series’ next instalment in the works.

It's hard to believe it now, but Dylan "TheBoyDilly" Johnson – CEO and founder of the wildly successful Good Gamers – didn't ever plan to be a game developer.

I knew I was in for a stomach-churning time with Divine Frequency's demo after I finally acquired my first weapon. I came up to a fenced hallway in the game's vast industrial underbelly and spied an ominous figure looming way down the hall. The light above it cut out, I turned around, and there it was: a horrible faceless mannequin an eyelash's length away.

Those who were around when the original Deus Ex released will no doubt have an appreciation for this pretty innovative RPG. While we’re still not 100% sure whether a new game is in development or not, there’s something interesting happening with the OG.

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I've never had the space in my life or my house for a VR setup, but the promise of having an all-time favorite like Resident Evil 4 or Jedi Academy transformed by the tech always gives me pause. The DXU24 mod project for the original Deus Ex seems set to offer that and more.

California-based startup Perplexity AI, just a year into its journey, has secured $73.6 million in a series B funding round, bringing its total funding to $100 million. The investment comes from IVP, NEA, Databricks, Nvidia, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Kindred Ventures, with notable tech figures like Jeff Bezos and Nat Friedman joining as backers. What sets Perplexity AI apart is its ambition to revolutionise knowledge discovery through the Perplexity AI-native search engine, challenging industry giants Google and Microsoft. The startup, valued at over $500 million, plans to utilise the funding to enhance its AI-driven search engine capabilities. Perplexity co-founder and CEO is the Aravind Srinivas.

Despite already looking very good, Everspace 2 from Rockfish Games is moving to Unreal Engine 5. The engine upgrade will occur with the Spring Update, presumably before the second free major update, Incursions (launching in the same release window).

Rockfish have announced that they're updating arcade dogfighter Everspace 2 to run on Unreal Engine 5. The engine rollover will arrive as part of or alongside the game's Incursions update in spring 2024, which includes tweaks and bugfixes as well as extra legendary items and a new game feature of some description. The idea is less to take advantage of UE5's various whizbangs and bellwhistles, like the new Nanite geometry system, than to grease the launch chutes for future Everspace 2 updates and expansions.

Lies of P was one of the standout games in a year that was chock-full of instant classics, providing what many have deemed to be the best Soulslike experience in a game not developed by FromSoftware. Given the critical and commercial success the action RPG has enjoyed, it was no surprise when developer Neowiz announced in November that it was working on a sequel, and now, another interesting tidbit regarding its development may have emerged.

Guild Wars publisher NCSoft's long-rumoured Horizon: Zero Dawn spin-off is a full-blown MMORPG codenamed Project Skyline, will run on Unreal Engine 5, and is coming to PC and mobile with a PS5 release still TBC, according to a brace of job listings and CVs fished from the post-apocalyptic robo-wilds of yonder internet. Also according to the said listings, it won’t be out for a while.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is soon going to be remastered with GTA V's Rage Engine by some dedicated fans, as revealed by a new trailer.

I talked about Pachio-Kun some time ago for my Famicom Friday column because I thought the idea of an anthropomorphic pachinko mascot was amusing. Back then, I noted the staggering number of games in the series: at least 12.

2024 started off in the best possible way for PC gamers who are into Virtual Reality, thanks to the Public Beta release of the long-awaited UEVR mod project. This is an injector tool created by Praydog, the same modder behind the REFramework which also brought VR compatibility to all RE Engine games.

A talented group of GTA modders called Revolution Team are remaking Grand Theft Auto: Vice City as the "Nextgen Edition" using the RAGE engine that powered GTA 4.

A new Venom Unreal Engine 5 fan concept video has been released, showing what fans could expect from this rumored title.

Mabinogi, the long-running MMORPG that celebrated its 19th year recently, has recently dropped more details about their transformative leap with the Mabinogi Eternity Project. The project, as described by game director Min Kyung-hoon, is an ambitious endeavor to rejuvenate the game while retaining its classic essence. The team aims to communicate regularly with the Millesians (the game's community), sharing the challenges and advancements they encounter during this extensive overhaul.

Deck13, the developer of The Surge series and the recently released Atlas Fallen, is going to develop its next major project codenamed Foxtrot using Unreal Engine 5.

Publisher Electronic Arts has rebranded its Frostbite engine, with the aim of better reflecting the tech as a «platform for collaborative innovation».

Arkane Lyon's upcoming Marvel's Blade game is said to be using the same game engine as Deathloop and Dishonored 2.

Electronic Arts’ proprietary Frostbite engine has received a makeover with a new logo and brand identity. Instead of multiple splinters and shards, the handprint is now a smoother, more defined shape. While built to “explore, evolve and apply proprietary technology specifically with, and for, our game studios”, it now represents “a platform for collaborative innovation.”

Electronic Arts today announced a rebranding for Frostbite, its internal game development engine. It's the first new logo for the tech in nearly a decade.

Arkane Lyon looks to be building Marvel’s Blade on the same game engine as Deathloop’s.

AMD has announced that the full source code of FSR 3 is now available for developers using DX12 and Unreal Engine 5.

KT Racing’s Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown is out in 2024 and takes the series to Hong Kong Island. A new trailer showcases the racing experience as players barrel through the streets in supercars and even challenge others to races on the fly. Though it’s in-engine, the visuals look stunning. Check it out below.

Lightspeed Studios’ Los Angeles division has announced Last Sentinel, a new open-world title set in futuristic Tokyo, led by Steve C. Martin of Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption fame. It’s developed in Unreal Engine 5 – check out the first trailer below.

Looking for an RPG you probably haven’t played before? Maybe check out Tengai Makyou: Zirai, a 1989 PC-Engine CD-ROM² game that just got a fan translation.