Alongside the launch of Fortnite Chapter 3, Epic Games announced that Fortnite would be moving over to Unreal Engine 5, making it the first official game on the new engine. Fans have eagerly anticipated this move and improved graphics since the first demo of Unreal Engine back in May 2020. However, despite the move, Fortnite doesn’t look all too different from how it did on Unreal Engine 4. The changes that accompany the move to the updated version of Unreal Engine are more subtle, such as new weather and environment effects, rather than a vast improvement to the appearance of the popular battle royale game.
This is not to say that Fortnite won’t see improvements as a result of this move to the new Unreal Engine. With the rise of next-gen consoles, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, Unreal Engine 5 provides better support for next-gen hardware, delivering a better user experience. As a result, players that have been fortunate enough to get their hands on Sony or Microsoft's latest consoles may see more of an improvement between Fortnite's Chapter 2 and 3 than players on PC or older consoles.
Unreal Engine 5 also makes use of Epic’s new Nanite geometry system. Essentially, Nanite replaces the traditional polygon system for building assets. Nanite’s mesh format and rendering technology allows for pixel scale detail and high object counts, making loss of quality non-existent, and without hindering performance. Previously, some Fortnite players had to enable Performance Mode, sacrificing graphics quality in order to improve performance, especially on older hardware. Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite offers itself as the solution to this problem. In addition to Nanite, Unreal Engine 5 uses Lumen, a global illumination system. Lumen offers ray-tracing and better reactive lighting, with a vast improvement from the lighting on Unreal Engine 4. Fortnite players may notice the lighting improvements when experiencing Fortnite Chapter 3’s new weather system, such as the newly added baiting tornadoes.
Other Games May Show Unreal 5's Power Better Than Fortnite
Unreal Engine 5 offers a lot of improvements for developers too, which may not be noticeable to the average Fortnite player. It's rumored that BioWare is moving back to Unreal Engine instead of Frostbite for Mass Effect's next game. One benefit of Unreal Engine 5 over its predecessors is that it allows game designers and developers to work on the same world simultaneously, with changes updated in real-time. This provides better synchronicity, allowing multiple people to work on the same product, without impeding or overwriting one another’s work. For players, this may result in faster resolution times to known issues in the game and a quicker turnaround on bug fix patches, quality of life improvements, and new content. Other changes available to designers and developers on the latest version of Unreal Engine include animation control rigs, particle systems, and a new sound engine called MetaSound. For those interested, Unreal Engine’s website provides the latest news and resources.
While Fortnite players may not immediately notice the difference between Unreal Engine 4 and 5, the changes offer vast opportunities to game developers and designers, building on the previous versions of Unreal Engine with new technology and quality of life improvements. Fortnite players can most notably see the changes with the new weather system in-game, battling baiting tornadoes like those seen in Battlefield 2042, as well as new environment effects when cutting logs in Fortnite's Logjam Lumberyard. While Chapter 3’s in-game changes may not be groundbreaking, the possibilities available as a result of the move to Unreal Engine 5 will undoubtedly lead to more substantial changes to Fortnite in the seasons to come.