Gears Dev To Showcase Unreal Engine 5 Alpha Point Demo This Month

Gears of War Studio The Coalition will show off an Unreal Engine 5 technical demo this month at the Game Developers Conference, which will be presented by the studio's technical director Kate Rayner and technical art director Colin Penty. Dubbed the "alpha point" demo on Xbox Series X, the hour-long presentation will cover what the team learned while creating Nanite-resolution assets and incorporating them into a fully real-time lighting scenario with Lumen and Virtual Shadow Maps.

This hour-long presentation on July 20 at 4:20 PM PT / 7:20 PM ET will include plenty of insight into other aspects of Unreal Engine 5's inner workings and how they'll be used on Xbox Series X|S, such as material setup, temporal super-resolution, virtual texture findings, and other advanced visual effects. Preliminary findings on next-gen character creation and MetaHumans integration will also be covered through a character test running on Xbox Series X.

Back in May, The Coalition announced that it was shifting to next-gen game development exclusively while using the latest Unreal engine and that it had no plans to officially announce any of the new games that it's working on while it gets to grips with the software. One of those games is definitely not related to Star Wars.

Gears 5 will still be supported through to Operation 8 by the studio though, with new maps, characters, and other special events being added on a regular basis.

"As we look to future games, we're excited to start shifting our resources to next-gen development using Unreal Engine 5,” the studio explained in May. "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. Shifting to a new engine is a big undertaking, so we want to be clear that we will not be announcing any new projects or titles for some time."

Epic has already shown off a sneak peek of what developers can create in UE5, as it uploaded a sample project called Valley of the Ancient for its in-development engine. For more on the software and how its developers believe it will change the gaming landscape, you can check out our Unreal Engine 5 interview with senior technical designer Chance Ivey and VP of engineering Nick Penwarden.