The Wayward Realms - Wayward Radio Episode #10

[HiddenX]

Couchpotato spotted a new episode of Wayward Radio:

Wayward Radio Ep. #10: How Soon Is Now?

More information.

 

[Redglyph]

That's surprising: they decided to drop the Unreal Engine and make their own. Maybe it was discussed before, but I'm not following that very closely.

The Wayward Realms - Transitioning Away From Unreal - Steam News

We want to extend a sincere thank you for the overwhelmingly positive reception to our last Devlog. Your feedback made one thing absolutely clear, this community is here because you care about deep systems, meaningful choices, and solid, uncompromised gameplay. That clarity has guided our next...

store.steampowered.com

After reviewing the many thoughtful comments we received, we’ve made a major but exciting decision, we are fully transitioning away from Unreal Engine and building our own proprietary engine. This move gives us the control and flexibility needed to deliver the experience you’ve told us you want. Over the past few weeks, our entire focus has been on developing this new engine, and we’re thrilled to say that we’ll have something to show you soon, with a new Devlog showcase planned for early in the new year.
[…]

 

[largh]

That's surprising: they decided to drop the Unreal Engine and make their own.

They don't lack ambition. As if delivering the game they have been pitching hadn't been hard enough.

 

[JDR13]

After reviewing the many thoughtful comments we received, we’ve made a major but exciting decision, we are fully transitioning away from Unreal Engine and building our own proprietary engine.

The estimated release date just went from 2030 to 2047.

 

[Redglyph]

I found a few bits of lore in the Steam forums—even though I don't usually venture there after dark:

We are forking an existing engine, Wicked. But we will be developing most of it for our specific needs. Unreal does not offer as many benefits as they say they do. You can look at most AAA studios and how they wind up gutting Unreal systems to replace with their own. Even CDPR has Unreal Engine Developers assigned by Epic to create their own custom version of it.
[…]

We had already decoupled our system from Unreal, so over the past few weeks we have been porting those over. It has only been three weeks that we have been working in the new engine and we are almost up to parity. We also have our nightly builds running already. We can work so much faster in the new engine compared to Unreal, so we are confident in the June release window, though delays can of course still happen.

In the end, we made the choice to switch because we know it will actually be faster for us than if we stayed with Unreal and be a lot more performant as well.

I don't know of any game based on that engine; AFAIK it's experimental, but it seems to support the usual suspects: Windows, Xbox X/S, PS 5, plus Linux. They target Windows only anyway. It's open-source with an MIT licence, so they won't have any problem there (they won't have to make their source code public, as they'd have to with a GPL "free" licence).

It's definitely a bumpy road for them, after a dev leaving a few years back and another passing away not long ago.