Best Games Made with Unreal Engine in 2026

Unreal Engine is one of the most recognized game engines used for game design, known for changing the way developers create interacting experiences once it was released by Epic Games. There are countless famous games made with Unreal Engine, often known to people outside the gaming world, such as Fortnite, Black Myth: Wukong, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, STALKER 2, and Hogwarts Legacy.

The main advantage of this Game Engine is in its versatility, as you can equally work on AAA, indie, multiplayer, RPG, horror, and open-world genres.

In this article, we will discuss the best and most popular Unreal Engine games, notable Unreal Engine 5 titles, successful indie projects, and the engine capabilities that make these games possible.

The range of adoption that Unreal has across the game industry is genuinely impressive. The biggest game development names like Konami, Crystal Dynamics, and CD Projekt Red have abandoned their engines once they tried Unreal Engine. Konami used to work with its Fox Engine, but the Silent Hill 2 remake they made on Unreal. CD Projekt Red used to work with REDengine, and the last title they made with it was Cyberpunk 2077. Then they moved the next Witcher to Unreal Engine 5.

Such migrations are not easy, especially when it comes to these huge companies. At their scale it is a highly expensive and slow process, so if they are willing to do that, it is only because the reason is outstanding.

In this article, every entry names the release date, developer, engine version, and platforms, and the engine version is verified against public developer statements. Read on!

Key Takeaways

• A number of big studios have switched from their own engines to Unreal Engine because it gives better possibilities
• Unreal Engine has two main features: Nanite for very detailed 3D models and Lumen for lighting in real time
• Unreal is free until a game earns $1 million, only after that, Epic takes 5% of revenue.
• UE5 can handle many genres, including shooters, RPGs, horror, racing, and survival games.
• Fortnite was the first big game to use the full UE5 feature set, and many new engine features were tested there first.

How We Selected the Top Unreal Engine Games in 2026

When it comes to any games list, what matters a lot is the criteria behind it. That’s why we wanted to make it profound and based on real tangible data you can see yourself. We used seven filters for the top games made with Unreal Engine on this list:

• Critical reception. The number of reviews and how highly they rated games, nominations from GDC, BAFTA, and The Game Awards, and general reception of a certain title.
• Player popularity. Not only how popular it is among players, but also how big a community is, whether there are many communities across the world, and commercial success.
• Visual and technical achievement. What were the effects, graphics, and how well the game runs on target platforms.
• Effective use of Unreal Engine. We picked up only projects where Unreal was important for the final look of the game.
• Innovation. Anything notable or unusual in mechanics, world design, narrative, multiplayer architecture, or technical solutions.
• 2026 relevance. Games that people never stop playing.
• Genre diversity. We deliberately mix multiplayer, single-player, horror, racing, party, and simulation.

Importantly, “Best” here does not mean the highest Metacritic. We are looking at these games from the player perspective just as much as from the developer angle.

Popular Games Made with Unreal Engine in 2026

Unreal Engine has been used across all genres, and you can find out that live-service giants were relying on it just as much as single-player releases that are famous and talked about in just a single season.

In this section, we cover the popular Unreal Engine games that are recognized by name. Most of the games made in Unreal Engine here have been shipping and updating for years.

Game	Release Date	Developer	Unreal Engine Version	Genre
Fortnite	25 Jul, 2017	Epic Games	UE4, migrated to UE5	Party, Battle Royale
PUBG: Battlegrounds	20 Dec, 2017	Krafton	UE4	Battle Royale
Hogwarts Legacy	10 Feb, 2023	Avalanche Software	UE4	Action RPG
Ark: Survival Evolved	29 Aug, 2017	Studio Wildcard	UE4	Survival
Rocket League	7 Jul, 2015	Psyonix	UE3	Sports, Vehicular
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor	28 Apr, 2023	Respawn Entertainment	UE4	Action-Adventure
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth	29 Feb, 2024	Square Enix	UE4	JRPG
Sea of Thieves	20 Mar, 2018	Rare	UE4	Multiplayer Adventure
Batman: Arkham Knight	23 Jun, 2015	Rocksteady Studios	UE3	Action-Adventure
Borderlands 3	13 Sep, 2019	Gearbox Software	UE4	Looter Shooter

Fortnite

Release Date: 25 Jul, 2017 (Save the World early access); 26 Sep, 2017 (Battle Royale)
Developer: Epic Games
Genre: Party, Battle Royale, Third-person Shooter
Unreal Engine version: Launched on UE4, migrated to UE5 in December 2022 with Chapter 4
Platforms: PC (Epic Games Store), PlayStation 4/5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, App Store, Google Play

Fortnite’s first appearance can be described as a co-op tower defense game. Only a bit later after the release Epic added Battle Royale mode, and it became a hit. Today, Fortnite is more of a platform than a single game, because it includes concerts, Lego and racing modes. Moreover, content created by players in the game is built in Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) and it belongs to the same launcher.

Epic tested its own engine on Fortnite before other big game development studios had done that. Chapter 4 in December 2022 shipped on the full UE5 feature set, and Nanite, Lumen, and Chaos physics were all live in Fortnite, and again, it was before most studios started shipping them, too. If you want to see what upcoming games built with Unreal Engine 5 will look like, Fortnite is, in a way, a preview.

PUBG: Battlegrounds

Release Date: 20 Dec, 2017 (full release, following March 2017 early access)
Developer: Krafton (formerly PUBG Corporation)
Genre: Battle Royale, Tactical Shooter
Unreal Engine version: Unreal Engine 4
Platforms: PC (Steam), PlayStation 5, Xbox One, App Store, Google Play

PUBG is not the game that started the battle royale genre, but it is definitely the title that made it highly popular. Brendan Greene’s mod for Arma became a standalone game, and by 2018 it had crossed 30 million copies sold only on PC.

The game has been built on Unreal Engine 4, but it is not to just say that, because it actually did something highly unusual: streaming 8×8 kilometers maps for a hundred concurrent players with reasonable frame rates on mid-range PCs.

It is one of the older popular games made with Unreal Engine that still has a big community of players even today. The style was rather slow, involving a lot of tactics, which differentiated it from Fortnite and Apex Legends.

Hogwarts Legacy

Release Date: 10 Feb, 2023
Developer: Avalanche Software
Genre: Action RPG, Action-Adventure, Open World
Unreal Engine version: Unreal Engine 4
Platforms: PC (Steam), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch

Hogwarts Legacy sold over 24 million copies in its first year, making it the best-selling game of 2023 worldwide. It is the biggest single-player Warner Bros. game of the last decade and the highest-profile Wizarding World product since the final film.

Unreal Engine 4 had to handle a densely detailed Hogwarts castle and an open world of Hogsmeade. And that is not all; there are also the surrounding highlands, and the Forbidden Forest, with often changing weather.

Avalanche used a customized UE4 branch with their own lighting and streaming systems for all these things. This is an example of what a strong art team can do with the older engine version, and a reminder that UE4 is not finished as a shipping platform.

Combat and spell design are separate, well-created systems. There are also powerful spells that allow combat to be smoother.

Ark: Survival Evolved

Release Date: 29 Aug, 2017 (full release, following June 2015 early access)
Developer: Studio Wildcard
Genre: MMO, Survival, Open World
Unreal Engine version: UE4 (original), UE5 for the Ark: Survival Ascended remake
Platforms: PC (Steam), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo

In Ark: Survival Evolved players start naked on a beach. Fast-forward to the next stages, you will be leading packs of tamed Rexes, trying to build bases all over.

The 2023 UE5 remake, Ark: Survival Ascended, showed, if not the whole range of what you can get with a new engine, then definitely gave a good look at its possibilities. The graphics and many elements (foliage, water) look much more impressive. Launch performance was rough and took months to make it better.

Ark is still one of the top games made with Unreal Engine in the survival genre, with hundreds of thousands of Steam Workshop mods.

Rocket League

Release Date: 7 Jul, 2015
Developer: Psyonix (now owned by Epic Games)
Genre: Sports, Racing Hybrid, Vehicular Soccer
Unreal Engine version: Unreal Engine 3
Platforms: PC (Steam), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Android (Epic Game Store)

If you want to see a simple idea done perfectly in game development, you have to take a look at this game. Not only will you see cars playing soccer, but also rocket boosts and aerial hits.

It is also one of the older popular Unreal Engine games on this list, still on Unreal Engine 3. Psyonix decided to choose UE3 for its physics reliability and network stability. There was no reason to migrate the game, because everything worked well. After all, sometimes not touching the foundation is the right call.

Epic bought Psyonix in 2019 and moved Rocket League to free-to-play the following year. Monthly active users have stayed north of 70 million since.

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor

Release Date: 28 Apr, 2023
Developer: Respawn Entertainment
Genre: Action-Adventure, Souls-like
Unreal Engine version: Unreal Engine 4
Platforms: PC (Steam), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S

Cal Kestis returns in a bigger, more open sequel to Fallen Order. The world is bigger this time, with more planets to explore. The lightsaber combat is still inspired by souls, and now you can switch between different fighting positions.

The game runs on a customized version of Unreal Engine 4. Its PC launch was rough, many things simply did not work that well the first month. Thanks to patches, many problems were solved. Even big studios can hit UE4 issues that take months to fix. Sometimes games made in Unreal Engine can come with such a technical price.

The Force powers and lightsaber stances make combat the main or one of the main things in this game, and the environment art on Koboh and Jedha is without doubt one of the best among Respawn’s works.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

Release Date: 29 Feb, 2024 (PS5); 23 Jan, 2025 (PC)
Developer: Square Enix
Genre: JRPG, Action RPG
Unreal Engine version: Unreal Engine 4
Platforms: PC (Steam), PlayStation 5

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is the second of three games remaking the original Final Fantasy VII, and now it picks up after Midgar. This time the world is open, full of mounts, chocobo racing, lots of mini-games, and a card game called Queen’s Blood. You can literally spend hours on that one alone.

Square Enix built it on Unreal Engine 4. Anyone who knows these guys would be surprised, because it is highly unusual for them: they usually build their own engines. However, UE4 helped them ship faster: rebirth came out only four years after Remake. And that’s really quick for such a big game.

It’s one of the best-looking games made with Unreal Engine 4 from the last two years.

Sea of Thieves

Release Date: 20 Mar, 2018
Developer: Rare
Genre: Multiplayer Adventure, Pirate Sandbox
Unreal Engine version: Unreal Engine 4
Platforms: PC (Steam), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S

Sea of Thieves had a rough launch, but slowly it became a real hit. Weekly and seasonal updates for over seven years, just imagine it! So it is no wonder the game has a strong live-service community. The 2024 PlayStation release brought in even more new players.

The engine work is impressive. The water is still some of the best in any game, the physics of it is genuinely impressive. The toon-shaded art style is still very good-looking. What Rare achieved is that the licensed engine looks like their own. Many studios try and only a few actually managed to do the same.

Batman: Arkham Knight

Release Date: 23 Jun, 2015
Developer: Rocksteady Studios
Genre: Action-Adventure
Unreal Engine version: Unreal Engine 3 (heavily modified)
Platforms: PC (Steam), PlayStation 5, Xbox One

Arkham Knight is the last game in the Arkham trilogy and… still the best-looking of the three. The Batmobile is fully drivable this time, which opens up Gotham as a proper open world.

The game runs on a heavily modified Unreal Engine 3. Rocksteady Studios worked with it to push it even further than any other UE3 game. So, the rain effects, character detail, and city density were actually looking from another level completely. The release was in 2015 but even today it looks like a new game.

It is one of the most famous Unreal Engine games with some mechanics being absolutely legendary.

Borderlands 3

Release Date: 13 Sep, 2019
Developer: Gearbox Software
Genre: Looter Shooter
Unreal Engine version: Unreal Engine 4
Platforms: PC (Steam), PlayStation, Xbox Series X|S

Borderlands 3 is an action role playing shooter, where you also aim to loot. Gearbox moved the series from UE3 to Unreal Engine 4, and if you compare the visuals with Borderlands 2, you will be impressed by the difference.

Many reviewers say that combat is fun and engaging, but the storyline is weaker than in previous versions. Still, technical decisions that have become possible thanks to Unreal Engine, made the game irresistible.

Famous Unreal Engine 5 Games in 2026

Unreal Engine 5 is the newest one, and it has a great set of new features. For example, Nanite works with very detailed geometry, Lumen does real-time lighting, while World Partition helps to translate large open worlds. For characters, UE5 has MetaHuman and for physics there is Chaos.

Epic built the Unreal Engine 5 for big worlds, and they wanted to deliver film-quality visuals in real time, which this engine does very well. Thanks to this new version, small teams can make visuals that in the past would require the work of the huge art departments.

Game	Release Date	Developer	Genre	Why It’s Notable
STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl	20 Nov, 2024	GSC Game World	FPS, Survival Horror	Massive open-world Zone with dynamic weather and A-Life 2.0
Black Myth: Wukong	20 Aug, 2024	Game Science	Action RPG	Nanite on almost every asset, cinematic bosses
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33	24 Apr, 2025	Sandfall Interactive	Turn-based RPG	30-person team, JRPG-scale ambition, Belle Époque art direction
Split Fiction	6 Mar, 2025	Hazelight Studios	Co-op Action-Adventure	Split-screen at high fidelity across dozens of set-pieces
Silent Hill 2 (2024)	8 Oct, 2024	Bloober Team	Survival Horror	Faithful remake of the 2001 classic with modern rendering

STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl

Release Date: 20 Nov, 2024
Developer: GSC Game World
Genre: First-person Shooter, Survival Horror, Action-Adventure
Platforms: PC (Steam), PlayStation, Xbox Series X|S

STALKER 2 came out 15 years after the first trilogy, with an amazing story behind its creation. GSC Game World kept working through Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. They moved part of the team out of Kyiv and finished the game with two studios, one in Ukraine and one in the Czech Republic. In the end, they offered to the gaming community one of the biggest open-world shooters of the decade. It is definitely one of the most popular Unreal Engine games.

The Zone is about 64 square kilometers, with weather, day-night cycles, and a new A-Life 2.0 system. Its aim is to run faction behavior in the whole map. Photorealistic art style, with Nanite perfectly conveying the ruined buildings and Lumen making the harsh sky lighting are the main visual details people usually think about when they talk about this game.

At launch it had performance problems on Xbox and on weaker PCs, and A-Life had bugs requiring fixing. Right now, though, it’s a real example of what UE5 can do for a mid-sized team. Of all the games made with Unreal Engine 5 in 2024, nothing else tried to do this much.

Black Myth: Wukong

Release Date: 20 Aug, 2024
Developer: Game Science
Genre: Action RPG, Souls-like
Platforms: PC (Steam), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S

Black Myth: Wukong sold over 20 million copies in its first month and got Game of the Year nominations almost everywhere. It’s the first Chinese AAA action game that became successful worldwide.

The game shows best how good Nanite can be. Almost every part of the environment is built thanks to Nanite’s tech. If you haven’t seen how this game looks yet, the best way to describe it would be to call the visuals movie-level. Boss fights are big cinematic examples that use Lumen and Nanite together. Without doubt, only UE5 games can do it right now.

Combat is slow, careful more in the Souls style. If you want to see what modern games created with Unreal Engine look like when a team of about 140 people spends five years on visuals, this is the one.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Release Date: 24 Apr, 2025
Developer: Sandfall Interactive
Genre: Turn-based JRPG
Platforms: PC (Steam), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S

Clair Obscur was made by a 30-person French studio, and it was their first game. It became one of the most praised RPGs of the year. The closest way to describe its style would be to compare Belle Époque Paris mixed with Persona and Final Fantasy X.

The team used MetaHuman for the character creation, and Nanite for the environments. It’s one of the best Unreal Engine 5 games in 2026 has to offer, one of the more famous games made with Unreal Engine from a first-time studio, and, moreover, an example to pursue for every mid-size studio wanting to make a JRPG.

Split Fiction

Release Date: 6 Mar, 2025
Developer: Hazelight Studios
Genre: Co-op Action-Adventure
Platforms: PC (Steam), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S

Josef Fares and Hazelight’s first success was It Takes Two, and following it, they have created another masterpiece. Two writers get inside their own books, and they can’t get out. One sci-fi, one fantasy, and now they have to work together to get out of their own creations. Inventive, and for sure one of the top Unreal Engine 5 games.

A lot is happening in this game, and players get to experience motorcycle chases as much as dragon flights, cyberpunk shooter adventures. The amount of ideas and changes is big. Unreal Engine 5 is used here to be running high-quality split-screen, and that has always been hard for the engine, especially when there are a lot of different set-pieces.

It is one of the most popular games made with Unreal Engine from this generation, and one of the more technically ambitious games made in Unreal Engine 5 because of the split-screen work.

Silent Hill 2 (2024)

Release Date: 8 Oct, 2024
Developer: Bloober Team
Genre: Survival Horror
Platforms: PC (Steam), PlayStation 5

Classic 2001 version of this game, many people thought, can’t be better. But in 2024, its new version surprised almost everyone. Konami is not known for careful stewardship of legacy properties, and Bloober also does not have a straight reputation with a lot of rather mixed reviews regarding their work. However, what they presented is one of the best survival horror games in years, and one of the best Unreal Engine 5 games.

The fog effects that were the main things about the original image of the game are recreated with volumetric rendering, and the town of Silent Hill thanks to Lumen has heavy indoor lighting work. Over-the-shoulder combat is now in the game instead of the original’s tank controls. Not many beloved older games in their modern reimagining really are capable of impressing fans. However, in this case, its identity remains intact which won over the hearts of the audience.

This is also one of the more prominent games built with Unreal Engine 5 in the horror genre.

Tip: If you are evaluating UE5 for a new project, play Black Myth: Wukong. You can learn what the engine can do at the top end of budgets if you study and analyze this game well.

Best Indie Games Made with Unreal Engine

Unreal is way more than just a powerful AAA engine. One of the biggest changes, almost a revolution it brought, is allowing small teams to do quality visual and technical work with no need to build the underlying tech from the ground. The smallest teams, even of 5-8 people on board, can access resources that used to require huge departments. Unreal Engine 5 indie games are thriving now, just because this platform has made it possible to ship many games with fewer resources.

In this section, we will explore indie games made with Unreal Engine created by small and mid-sized teams. All of these Unreal Engine indie games shipped and sold, and some of them went on to sequels, expansions, or major post-launch updates.

Game	Release Date	Developer	Engine Version	Genre
Palworld	19 Jan, 2024	Pocketpair	UE5	Survival, Monster-Taming
Kena: Bridge of Spirits	21 Sep, 2021	Ember Lab	UE4	Action-Adventure, Puzzle
Pacific Drive	22 Feb, 2024	Ironwood Studios	UE4	Driving Survival
Stray	19 Jul, 2022	BlueTwelve Studio	UE4	Adventure, Puzzle
The Midnight Walk	8 May, 2025	MoonHood Games	UE5	Horror Adventure

Palworld

Release Date: 19 Jan, 2024 (early access)
Developer: Pocketpair
Genre: Survival, Monster-Taming, Open World
Unreal Engine version: Unreal Engine 5
Platforms: PC (Steam), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S

Just some statistics before we get into the gist of the game: Palworld sold 25 million copies in its first month. Pocketpair, a team of about 40 people, made a survival game where you have to catch monsters that a lot of players said looked a lot like Pokémon. Nintendo and The Pokémon Company later sued Pocketpair over patents covering some of the game’s mechanics. In any case, whatever you think of the design comparisons, the sales speak for themselves.

In the game, you collect creatures and go through base building. Essentially, it is a multiplayer survival game. Unreal Engine 5 handles a big open world with hundreds of unique creatures and lots of player-built structures, all synced across servers. Again, the fact that the game works at all is impressive for such a small team.

Palworld is the recent example of a small team shipping a global hit on Unreal Engine 5. It’s already inspired a wave of new games created with Unreal Engine from teams the same size.

Kena: Bridge of Spirits

Release Date: 21 Sep, 2021
Developer: Ember Lab
Genre: Action-Adventure, Puzzle
Unreal Engine version: Unreal Engine 4
Platforms: PC (Steam), PlayStation 4/5

Ember Lab used to be an animation studio before making Kena. You can see that in the game: it looks a lot like a Pixar film. It is the go-to example of a game using Unreal Engine to genuinely rival animated feature quality.

The team was around 15 people, and it is important to mention that number in the current context. Why? Because Kena picked up nominations for animation, art direction, and audio design, competing against projects with ten times the headcount. UE4’s rendering and animation tools let a small studio jump over their own heads.

The story itself follows Kena, a young spirit guide who uses her magical abilities to help the souls of the dead pass from the physical world to the spirit world. It is an action adventure that mixes combat and exploration.

Pacific Drive

Release Date: 22 Feb, 2024
Developer: Ironwood Studios
Genre: Driving Survival, Roguelike
Unreal Engine version: Unreal Engine 4
Platforms: PC (Steam), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S

Pacific Drive is a survival game, but your main goal here is to make sure… your car survives. The action is set in an alternate Pacific Northwest, and it definitely doesn’t lack anomalies. Something strange has happened inside the Olympic Exclusion Zone, and now it is an area covered by a fence. There is supernatural weather and physics, and you’re stuck inside it. Your old station wagon is your only way out and that’s why you have to keep it alive.

Each run is very similar. You drive into the zone, look for parts that can be used to upgrade the car, and try to make it back to your garage before anything bad happens. It might be a flat tire, a broken axle, or even a possessed door that opens on its own during a storm. Any of those things can cut a trip short.

Ironwood built the whole thing on Unreal Engine 4 with a tiny team. The car customization and the strange anomalies all come together as one of the more original survival games of the last few years. It’s a good example of a small team using a mature engine to focus on one strong idea, while very often they try to do everything.

Stray

Release Date: 19 Jul, 2022
Developer: BlueTwelve Studio
Genre: Adventure, Puzzle
Unreal Engine version: Unreal Engine 4
Platforms: PC (Steam), PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2, Xbox Series X|S

In Stray you play as a cat, in a run-down cyberpunk city with no people around, because the city is populated by robots only. This idea on its own was the reason they sold a lot of copies. BlueTwelve, a small studio in Montpellier, spent seven years on it, and as a result they gave a gaming community one of the best-looking adventure games of the decade.

The environment art shows how UE4 fits for it: neon signs, rain, wet streets, and narrow alleys all look so good and genuinely impressive due to the engine’s lighting. The game is short and takes only six hours or so.

Stray is one of the more original indie games on this list in terms of idea, even though it runs on UE4, not on the newest UE5. It shows what a small team can do with a licensed engine and an unusual vision.

The Midnight Walk

Release Date: 8 May, 2025
Developer: MoonHood Games
Genre: Horror Adventure, Puzzle
Unreal Engine version: Unreal Engine 5
Platforms: PC (Steam), PlayStation 5

The Midnight Walk is a horror adventure with every character and environment sculpted in clay by hand, then scanned into the game. MoonHood, a studio started by former Zoink Games staff, built it in Unreal Engine 5. They used Lumen to create the game’s candle and lantern lighting. You literally have a lantern guide here, named Potboy, and you will use his help throughout the game.

Scanning real clay models into the engine is rather unusual, and it does not happen often in games of that level. But it is another example of UE5 versatility, and that’s what makes the game even more engaging. Unreal’s tools now allow small teams to do things that used to need a big studio. The game works on a regular screen and in VR.

Right now, this is one of the newer indie games made with Unreal Engine to get strong reviews. It also shows that the “indie game with a AAA look” that UE5 promised is actually happening.

Why Indie Developers Choose Unreal Engine

As we have seen in the examples above, there are many amazing games made by small studios. But let’s name more tangible reasons why they use it:

• Access to advanced rendering. Lumen and Nanite are the tools that can give a five-person team lighting and geometry budgets that used to need a full tech-art team. Take a look at Clair Obscur, it is the best recent example.
• Blueprint visual scripting. Designers and artists can build and test mechanics without a programmer. Most projects use a mix of Blueprint and C++. Blueprint’s main strength is speed as it allows you to test an idea in just a few hours that would take a week to write in code.
• Asset library. Fab (Epic’s marketplace), Quixel Megascans, and MetaHuman allow small teams to replace a lot of what goes into a normal art pipeline. For example, only Megascans saves many studios weeks of texturing work. Unreal Engine indie games all use asset libraries that might actually enhance a simple game and make it visually richer.
• Scalability. Thanks to scalability settings, the same projects can run on different devices. For example, Palworld runs on eight-year-old hardware and on current consoles, and they haven’t changed the build for that.
• AAA-level graphics with a small team. What used to require the work of a huge team now can be done with small teams. We have listed many projects that would not have been possible without Unreal doing technical work.
• Cross-platform support. One codebase covers PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Switch 2, and mobile. It does not mean it’s automatic, because every platform needs some work done to be adjusted. However, you have to work much less to make it happen.

Tip: If you’re working with Unreal Engine 5 for the first time, do not overuse Nanite and Lumen. Even though they are very powerful and rather interesting to use, they will cost you a lot later to run. Ark: Survival Ascended has been shipped with both fully turned on and then the team behind the game spent months getting the frame rate back to a decent level.

What Makes Unreal Engine Popular for Game Development?

We have seen what games using Unreal Engine can look like and what they can achieve. Let’s explore now the tools that made possible everything we have described in this article.

High-End Graphics and Real-Time Rendering

For a long time Unreal has been the best out of all engines in real-time rendering. You can do it with physically based rendering, dynamic lighting, high-quality shaders, and cinematic post-processing. All inside one engine which is also extremely convenient.

Sequencer, Unreal’s cinematic tool, has also become a standard part of AAA work for planning shots and cutscenes, and top Unreal Engine games are using it all the time. Studios use the same engine to prototype cutscenes, film in-engine trailers, and ship the final game. No wonder Unreal has taken over so much of the industry.

Nanite and Lumen in Unreal Engine 5

We’ve mentioned these features many times across the article, so you can see why they are so vital. But let’s explore each one more deeply.

Nanite allows artists to put very detailed 3D models right into the game, for example, a rock scanned with millions of polygons. Unreal handles the details on its own. Before Nanite, artists had to make a low-detail version of that rock, bake a normal map from the high-detail one, and set up several detail stages by hand. Now, this feature handles everything very well, saving artists a lot of time.

Black Myth: Wukong uses Nanite on almost every environment asset, and the level of detail is far beyond anything from UE4. Most of the top Unreal Engine 5 games so far use Nanite for environments at least, and many of the new games made with Unreal Engine 5 in production now use it by default.

Lumen does real-time global illumination. In older engines, indirect lighting had to be baked in advance, which usually took hours of rendering. Lumen updates it live as you work. It has real performance costs and doesn’t fit every game, but if you’re aiming for a cinematic look, that’s what you need.

STALKER 2’s day-night cycles and Silent Hill 2’s indoor scenes are possible in the way they were created thanks to Lumen. There is a cost, though, because Lumen is way more expensive than baked lighting.

Blueprint Visual Scripting

Blueprint is Unreal’s visual scripting system. Designers and artists can build gameplay logic by connecting nodes on a screen.

In real projects, Blueprint is used with code, it is not a replacement for it. Most shipped Unreal games use C++ for anything that needs to run fast, Blueprint for gameplay logic and quick changes. Fortnite, Hogwarts Legacy, and Rocket League all work this way. Designers use Blueprint to just get the idea of how something might look. The final version of most systems is written in C++.

Cross-Platform Development

Unreal supports PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, iOS, Android, and various VR headsets from a single project. That is real, and it is why so many multi-platform releases pick Unreal.

However, it does not automatically mean that you will have identical experiences on every platform. You still have to update games to each platform, but thanks to cross-platform development it is much less work.

Tools for AAA and Indie Teams

The same engine now powers Fortnite (Epic, hundreds of engineers) and Palworld (Pocketpair, around 40 people). Yes, games made in Unreal Engine 5 can serve well for studios of different sizes.

The royalty model is a big part of the indie advantage, because Unreal is free to use until a project earns $1 million gross. After that, Epic takes 5% of revenue. There is also a separate no-royalty option for games released on the Epic Games Store. Terms have changed over the years and can change again, so any studio should verify current terms in the Unreal Engine EULA before committing.

Source code access is another factor. Unreal ships with full C++ source, which means studios can modify the engine itself when they need to.

Multiplayer and Large-Scale Worlds

Unreal has strong networking foundations. Replication, dedicated server support, and Epic Online Services (matchmaking, friends, achievements, cross-platform play) all ship as part of the platform. It is no wonder so many games made with Unreal Engine 5 are valued so highly in the gaming world.

For persistent live-service games, the engine plus EOS covers most of what a studio would otherwise have to build. Fortnite, PUBG, and Sea of Thieves all use these foundations, though each studio implements its own layer of live-service infrastructure on top.

For large single-player worlds, World Partition (introduced in UE5) is a very important technology. It conveys the world based on player position; for example, in STALKER 2 it covers 64 square kilometers. In Hogwarts Legacy, this solution handles the highlands. Before World Partition became available, development teams had to go heavy on engineering and build their own streaming systems.

Did You Know? Epic Games’ own Fortnite team ships engine changes back to the main Unreal Engine branch on a regular cadence. Many of the features that end up in later UE5 releases were tested first in Fortnite. This is why the Fortnite Chapter releases often preview what other UE5 games will start using six to twelve months later.

For further reading on the engine’s technical direction, Epic maintains detailed documentation on the official Unreal Engine site and posts case studies from developers shipping on UE5.

Fgfactory’s Experience with Unreal Engine Game Development

Fgfactory is a full-cycle game development and game art outsourcing studio working since 2010, with teams in Ukraine and Australia. We work on Unreal Engine projects across production and porting, and we build game art specifically for Unreal pipelines.

The services most relevant to studios evaluating the engine include full-cycle development, game art and 3D asset production tuned for Nanite and modern material workflows, and porting or engine migration between UE4, UE5, and other engines. We know how to deliver games made with Unreal Engine 5 that would be the enhancement of your ideas.

Collaboration models include full-cycle development, dedicated teams embedded with your existing production, and co-development where we take responsibility for specific systems or content while your team owns the rest.

Planning an Unreal Engine project? Get a free consultation with the Fgfactory team.