I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been duped. Tricked into thinking that the footage shown during a commercial for a video game was the actual footage that you would expect to see while playing the game. But sadly that is usually not the case as I recently found out when playing Destiny. Instead what we’re seeing are the cinematic cut scenes that get embedded within the game to move the story along or similar footage shot just for the demo/commercial.
However, in the near future things might be different. Soon we might be able to play video games with stunningly realistic movie quality imagery unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. Imagery that will finally bring those cut scenes to life.
Mike Maven, developer of the forthcoming game A Dog’s Dream summed it up best when he said:
“The next wave of video games coming is going to be truly insane. Unreal Engine 5 can import full cinematic quality models made of billions of polys and can render them in dynamic lighting in real time, all the way out to the horizon. We’ll basically be getting playable cut scenes.”
As mind-blowing as that sounds this isn’t the first time that the idea of movie quality video games has been bandied about. It’s long been the holy grail of video game design. It just wasn’t possible to pull off until now.
As CNET puts it:
“I’ve heard the idea before: living film. A game that feels cinematic. This has been every PlayStation’s promise since the beginning of the century.
Watching Epic Games’ first peek at Unreal Engine 5 on PlayStation 5, however, ended up making me more of a believer than I thought I’d be.
The video, run on PlayStation 5 hardware according to Epic, is largely a showcase for how much detail Unreal Engine 5 can present, and how it can be lit. The whole 8-plus-minute video looks like a pre-rendered cut scene or part of a lush animated film.
The style, somewhere between Tomb Raider and Assassin’s Creed, shows a woman exploring a cave. She finds endless elaborate statues and finally flies across a crumbling city that extends to the horizon. Unreal Engine 5’s key features are an ability to bring in film-level digital assets and render them via tech called Nanite, which enables a ton of polygons to be presented at once, and a complete lighting system called Lumen that promises to dynamically light every scene detail of those polygons on the fly.”
I’m not an avid gamer but after watching the demo I must admit that I got a certain sense of adrenaline. An unshakable feeling that what I was watching was important. A glimpse of the future. And its likely just the beginning. As time goes on and processing power increases while AI capabilities rise it’s likely that video games will get even more stunningly realistic. Maybe even to the point where you can’t even tell that you’re playing a video game at all. But until then we’ll have to settle for the next best thing: Unreal Engine 5.
Is Unreal Engine 5 the Greatest Idea Ever?
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