Ex Bethesda devs' ambitious Elder Scrolls Daggerfall successor ditches UE5 for its own engine to make "a far better game"

Some games carry a certain Unreal Engine 5 look, just like some games looked like UE3 games (Gears, Arkham Asylum - I'm looking at you). The dramatic Lumen lighting, water that sparkles, dirt that looks like it'd part beneath your boot. While Epic's engine helps bring countless visions to life, some of us do love to rag on UE5 for its perceived performance issues. But, love it or hate it, Unreal Engine 5 is a staple of both triple-A development and often ambitious indies. Enter The Wayward Realms, an upcoming open-world adventure pitched as a spiritual successor to The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall, hailing from developer OnceLost Games and headed up by Bethesda veterans Julian LeFey and Ted Peterson. Now, the studio has decided to ditch UE5 for its own proprietary engine.

If you haven't heard of The Wayward Realms, it's a self-described "grand RPG," and it thrusts you into a sprawling, realistically scaled open world with over one hundred islands to explore. Cities apparently feature hundreds of thousands of NPCs, and the rather pretty landscapes are procedurally generated.

Promising "real role-playing" that extends beyond cookie-cutter spellcaster or angry, bellowing warrior, it's an easy game to get excited about on paper. The screenshots of the Archipelago's vistas and beasties look stunning, and the intricacies of its choice-driven narrative systems sound like this writer's dream come true. It's a big, ambitious swing from veteran Bethesda devs, and that goes some way to lending the project a little trust.

But, while it was initially being built in UE5, a Monday December 1 Steam post confirms that the team is "transitioning away" from the engine and building their own.

"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 post reads. "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.

"Shifting to our own engine is a major step, and while it positions us to deliver a far better game, it also means we won't be able to meet the end-of-year goal we previously set," it continues. "Our new target is to release to our Kickstarter backers in June of next year, with a public Early Access release following a few months later. "

OnceLost claims that its new engine can "achieve 30+ fps on decade-old laptops without dedicated GPUs," as well as a first-generation Nintendo Switch. As a result, it can "load Eyjar, a static map four times the size of Manhattan, in under one second." Not bad.

It also opens the game up for player-created mods, "using a public scripting language inspired by C# as a tribute to the Daggerfall Unity community."

This is obviously a pretty radical shift, especially this far into the game's development, but if the new screenshots are anything to go by, it at least still looks the part. We've seen so many cases of dreaded 'UE5 stutter,' not to mention complaints about the 'UE5 look,' that moving away from the engine so publicly is likely to garner the project a weird dose of online goodwill. Whether the game itself, irrespective of its engine, can deliver on its lofty ambitions remains to be seen, but I'm the cautiously optimistic type. Roll on June!