The Unreal Engine 5 PS5 Demo Isn't a Real Game, But It Is Fully Playable

Epic Games unveiled the Unreal Engine 5 today and showcased it with a real-time PlayStation 5 tech demo called Lumen in the Land of Nanite. While the tech demo is not a real game in development, it is fully playable, Epic confirmed. IGN asked Epic Games CTO Kim Libreri and Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney if the Lumen demo, which is running in real-time on a PlayStation 5 development kit, was real. Libreri said that it is not a real game, but Sweeney interjected with a surprising twist. “It is playing 100% in real-time on the [PlayStation 5] and you do have full control over the character,” Sweeney says after Libreri said the demo was not a real game. It turns out that just means the demo is not a real game in development with plans for release. The demo itself does function. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/05/13/ps5-unreal-engine-5-tech-demo"] “It’s totally playable,” Libreri confirmed. “In fact, if GDC happened we would have let people play through the thing.” So there you have it, while Epic did not create a whole new game for the PlayStation 5, they did build a working, playable demo running off a PlayStation 5 dev kit. Earlier in the interview, Libreri even told IGN, “I think a lot of people [will ask], ‘Oh is [the demo] real?’ But you know that demo was grabbed from the back of a PlayStation 5 development kit. An HDMI cable went into a disc recorder and played out real-time — no editing, no tricks, that’s what comes off the box.” So while you won’t be able to play Lumens in the Land of Nanite when the PS5 is released, you have a handle of what games look like as they run and play on the next-gen PS5 console. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=unreal-engine-5-playstation-5-tech-demo&captions=true"] Tim Sweeney isn't just interested in the visual fidelity the engine offers either, pointing to how Unreal Engine 5 – in conjunction with next-gen hardware – should allow for brand new kinds of games to emerge. Pointing to how Battle Royale games could only have emerged with current-gen processing and networking power, he explains how this could lead to another step into the unknown: "The technologies that we’re showing today [are] going to enable entirely new types of games that we can’t even envision yet. And that’s the exciting part. We can’t even imagine yet what this is going to enable the industry to do." Check out IGN’s full coverage of the Unreal Engine 5 reveal and Tim Sweeney’s comments on the breakthroughs of the PS5. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Matt Kim is a reporter for IGN.

source https://www.ign.com/articles/unreal-engine-5-demo-fully-playable-not-real