Unreal Engine 5 has drawn mixed reactions, which is hardly surprising. Games made with it don’t always look superior to UE4 projects, and they frequently run with lower performance.
OnceLost Games — a studio that includes developers who previously worked at Bethesda on Daggerfall and The Elder Scrolls: Arena — identified the issue and decided to abandon Unreal Engine 5 for The Wayward Realms.
After reviewing a large number of substantive comments, we reached an important — and admittedly difficult — decision: we are fully abandoning Unreal Engine and creating our own engine. This move gives us the control and flexibility needed to build the kind of gameplay you’ve been describing to us.
The Wayward Realms now runs at over 30 FPS on ten‑year‑old laptops without a discrete GPU, delivers nearly 30 FPS on the Nintendo Switch, and reaches 60 FPS on PS5 and Xbox Series X. A world map four times the size of Manhattan now loads in under a second. The new engine will also offer full mod support and native Linux compatibility.
The studio promised to release a video demonstrating visuals on Wicked Engine in a few weeks.
Source: iXBT.games