We've seen a trend in recent years of developers dropping their own game engines to move to Unreal Engine 5 as their game development software of choice. CD Projekt Red and 343 Industries were a couple of the most notable examples.
It's easy to see the appeal given UE5's graphics capabilities and its wide use, which saves new recruits from having to learn a proprietary engine. But Unreal Engine 5 has its detractors, particularly due to performance issues on lower-end hardware.
Now OnceLost Games, a studio founded by former Bethesda Devs has gone the other way and has ditched Unreal Engine 5 for the upcoming Wayward Realms. So could the tide be starting to turn?
OnceLost Games was founded by Ted Peterson, the late Julian LeFay and the composer Eric Heberling, who all worked together on the original Elder Scrolls and then Daggerfall.
The latter was a major influence for Wayward Realms, an open-world fantasy RPG that was announced in 2021 and was slated for a late-2025 release. But OneLost announced this week that the game now won't be ready until at least mid-2026 for backers due to a decision to shift development from Unreal Engine 5 to a proprietary engine.
That's a surprising and risky move given how expensive and time-consuming it is to transition mid-project. But the developers write in a post on Steam that the new engine will make Wayward Realms a "far better game".
That will include the ability to “achieve over 30 FPS on decade-old laptops without dedicated GPUs” and nearly 30 FPS on the first-generation Nintendo Switch. The game will also be able to load Eyjar, a static map four times the size of Manhattan, almost instantly.
Creative director Victor Villarreal has clarified in an interview on YouTube the new engine wasn't created by scratch. Instead, it's a fork from Wicked, a free engine developed by 1 dev.
He said the team was having optimisation issues with Unreal and that it was taking too long to implement systems. After trying Unreal Engine Angelscript but still having problems, they looked into around a dozen other engines and found Wicked the easiest and quickest to adapt.
The developers say the switch is already benefiting their work, more than doubling development speed because they can “load the entire engine in roughly 300 milliseconds”, allowing for faster iteration.
The new engine will also provide full support for community modding outside the core systems via "public scripting language inspired by C# as a tribute to the Daggerfall Unity community". That could allow the kind of player-driven ecosystem that has helped kept games like Skyrim relevant for so long.
While this is only one developer, it could be worrying for Epic Games that a team of veteran developers has chosen to delay a project rather than persevere with Unreal, which is fast on its way to becoming an industry standard.
Gamers who dislike Unreal Engine 5 will be happy to hear that performance on low-end hardware is being prioritised over UE5's resource-intensive bells and whistles.
If you are interested in checking out recent UE5 projects, see Scans Factorys' 3D visualisation of Venice and an Unreal Engine 5 Zelda remake that's getting a lot of love from fans.
