State of Unreal: Everything announced for Unreal Engine, Fortnite

Epic Games has shown off the future of its powerful Unreal Engine, including a first glimpse at Amy Hennig's Captain America and Black Panther game, and closer integration of the eye-catching MetaHumans tech into UEN, during this year's annual State of Unreal broadcast by the company.

The show's highlight was its peek at Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra, Hennig's highly-anticipated World War 2 superhero game, which is built in Unreal Engine and shows off its latest features — including improved Nanite tesselation to make high-quality 3D geometry more memory efficient, and photo-realistic character animation using MetaHumans.

A preview build of Unreal Engine 5.4 launches today, ahead of its full release in late April. This adds Motion Matching that allows for simple AAA-quality character animation. Epic also demonstrated how Fortnite creators will be able to build custom Lego and Rocket Racing mini-games.

Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra | Story Trailer Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra debut trailer shows off its powerful Unreal Engine capabilities.

UEFN — the Unreal Engine-powered editor to build experiences and launch them within Fortnite — is now compatible with MetaHuman. A cool-looking demo named Talisman showed off how it all looks — and how UEFN can create realistic environments and people, very different to Fortnite's stylised battle royale modes. A key advance here is that optimisation of MetaHuman data can shrink its realistic character models down from almost 1GB in size to around 60MB.

More than 80,000 UEFN experiences have now been published in Fortnite, which have been played by 130 million players. In the past year, Epic has seen UEFN publishing grow from less than 50 experiences released per day, to more than 500 arrive daily. This has resulted in payouts totalling $320m for creators over the past 12 months.

Epic Games' UEFN Talisman demo, showcasing the potential for realistic-looking human characters and environments. | Image credit: Epic Games

Lego, Rocket