On the evening of March 20, Epic Games held its annual State of Unreal at GDC 2024 — during the hour-long presentation, they showed the trailer for Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra on UE5 and announced the launch of a mobile digital store on iOS and Android in 2024. We have collected the most interesting announcements and news.
Unreal Engine 5.4 Preview 1 is already available in the Epic Games lounge, repository GitHub, and for Linux. The full release will take place in late April. The UE 5.4 update features a number of rendering performance improvements, including major technology updates Nanite such as Nanite Tessellation for greater visual fidelity without increasing disk meshes.
Animation in UE 5.4 has also reached a whole new level with support for Motion Matching character animation technology, which uses machine learning to create smooth transitions between movements and requires ten times less memory than conventional Motion Matching. This technology has been used in Fortnite on all platforms since the launch of Chapter 5, and later this year Epic will publish a free (training) set of more than 500 AAA animations created from high-quality motion capture data.
Multi-Process Cook has received some optimizations that make it three times faster, compiling significantly fewer shaders in the editor. The developers have not forgotten about sound designers either — the new Audio Insights profiling tool will offer more opportunities for creating and fine-tuning audio.
The Procedural Content Generation Framework (PCG) — a set of tools for procedural content generation in Unreal Engine — has also received many improvements. Epic also decided to release the PCG Biome plugin for procedurally generated water, rivers, lakes, and swamps.
The presentation started with a rather unexpected announcement — the first look at 1943: Rise of Hydra, a new Marvel game on UE5 (Unreal Engine version 5.4 to be exact) about Black Panther and Captain America in the World War II setting. This is an action game with a focus on story, which is being developed by Amy Hennig (writer and creative director of the first three Uncharted titles) and the studio she founded, Skydance New Media. The studio is also developing a new game in the Star Wars franchise. Both are part of Disney’s growing portfolio of high-budget games, which has previously attracted such big-name developers as Insomniac, Quantic Dream, Ubisoft, Bethesda, Respawn, Arkane, and others to revive the gaming business.
As the story unfolds, players will switch between four central characters: young Steve Rogers (aka Captain America), Azzuri the Wise (T’Challa’s grandfather and World War II Black Panther), Gabriel Jones (an American soldier and member of the Howling Commandos), and Nanali (a spy from Wakanda who was sent to occupied Paris).
The debut trailer reveals some details of the plot and contains gameplay footage recorded on the engine — it looks pretty good, like a real next-gen. Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra will be released in 2025, but there is no exact list of platforms yet.
Epic has once again confirmed plans to launch the Epic Games Store on iOS and Android by the end of 2024. A full announcement of the mobile EGS with all the details will be made later, but the concept art shows the familiar Epic Games Store interface. Mobile only. Developers will receive 88% of sales in it, just like in the PC version, while Epic’s commission will be 12%.
Epic Games emphasizes that their Epic Games Store will be the world’s first multiplatform gaming store that will work on PC, Mac, iOS, and Android. It is worth recalling the figures from a recent report: in 2023, the number of EGS users on PC exceeded 270 million (+40 million), and including Epic cross-platform accounts —804 million.
Last year’s presentation of Epic Games at GDC, among other things, was memorable for the announcement of a powerful Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN). Now a number of new features have been announced for it. First of all, MetaHumans — a highly acclaimed tool that allows you to create realistic human models with your iPhone — is now available in UEFN. You can import any characters created with MetaHuman Creator and MetaHuman Animator into UEFN and then use them as NPCs in your games.
Other improvements planned for the end of 2024 include — elements for creating Fall Guys-style levels (May), the ability to do a much missed first-person perspective, and a «physical gameplay sandbox» that includes «the ability to use physically modeled characters in UEFN and Creative and simulate any static meshes».
All of this is part of Epic’s ambitious plan to turn Fortnite into Roblox a platform for games, where a significant part will be user-generated games. According to Epic, since 2023, more than 80,000 islands created with the help of UEFN have been published, joining major official releases such as Lego Fortnite and Fortnite Festival.
And not to be outdone, Epic continues to expand its cooperation with LEGO to include new features in the Fortnite editor. The new level includes the ability for Fortnite users to create LEGO-style mini-games — templates and all the necessary tools are already available in both Fortnite Creative and UEFN.
Like all other user-created games in Fortnite, LEGO games include license fees in addition to other terms and conditions, and the restrictions are somewhat stricter than with typical Fortnite Creative islands. For example, for the US, the ESRB rating must be E10+ (10 years and older), and for Europe — PEGI 7 (7 years and older).
Recently, the LEGO Fortnite game library has been expanded with several notable releases: in December, the Minecraft-style «Survivalist» Lego Fortnite was released, followed by two more games in February — multiplayer Lego Raft Survival and obstacle course Lego Obby Fun. The latest addition is three more Lego games coming to Fortnite: Prop Hunt, Battle Arena, and Cat Island Adventure.