Gears of War studio The Coalition will be doing an Unreal Engine 5 demo this month. This marks the studio’s full shift into next-gen development.
In the upcoming GDC 2021, The Coalition will be showing off what they can accomplish with the Unreal Engine 5. The Gears of War studio will offer a look into the inner workings of the system, using “The Alpha Point” demo.
Alpha Point demo is an evaluation of UE5
The Alpha Point demo will be an hour-long GDC presentation that will start at July 20, Tuesday 4:20PM EST. The presentation will come from the studio’s two most lauded members. These include technical director Kate Rayner and technical art director Colin Penty.
The idea of the entire tech demo is to test out the power of UE5 and evaluate its capabilities. The system will run on an Xbox Series X console, which has the most powerful hardware in the current console generation.
UE5 is the official engine that The Coalition is using in their upcoming titles. GDC this year will be all digital, which will run between July 19 to 23.
“The Coalition will debut a UE5 Technical Demo ‘Alpha Point’ on Xbox Series X, created to internally evaluate UE5,” said the description. “The talk will cover the learnings the team had while creating Nanite-resolution assets and incorporating them into a fully real-time lighting scenario with Lumen and Virtual Shadow Maps.
“Performance and memory observations will be covered for Xbox Series X and S. as well as VFX, Blueprint, material setup, Temporal Super Resolution, and Virtual Texture findings.
Another area that the demo will cover includes “next-gen character creation and MetaHumans integration.” Part of the demo will be “The Coalition will also work “demoing a next-generation character test running on Xbox Series X.”
The Coalition is going full next-gen
The Unreal Engine 5 is among the most powerful, if not the most powerful game development engine available right now. It also works as a VFX engine for movies and noted to be among the easiest to use so far.
The UE5 is next-gen incarnate, introduced around May last year. May this year, The Coalition announced that they are shifting to a full next-gen offering, and UE5 will lead the way.
“As we look to future games, we’re excited to start shifting our resources to next-gen development using Unreal Engine 5,” said a blog on their website. “Gears of War has always been at the front of Unreal Engine development – as a breakout 720p title for Xbox 360 through last year’s 120FPS multiplayer update for Xbox Series X|S – and we’re excited to continue that tradition by developing on UE5 for multiple new projects in the coming years.”
Fans and devs alike are looking forward to the Unreal Engine 5 demo. The Coalition’s Alpha Point should shine a better light on how good UE5 truly is.
Featured image courtesy of Gears of War/Youtube Screenshot