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Because it believes it can make a better game this way.
"Hello everyone and welcome back to another GRTV News.
Today we are going to be talking about something rather unusual I would say actually.
You might not have heard of this game, it's an indie title that's on its way, or maybe more AA, but it's on its way anyway, probably a few years down the line, and it's called The Wayward Realms."
"If you haven't heard it, it's because it hasn't even gone into Kickstarter yet, but the reason why we're talking about it today is because the developer, Once Lost Games, recently published a blog post on Steam wherein they revealed that they're developing the game on Unreal Engine to make it on their own proprietary engine, and while that might seem quite typical in a way, and it is quite typical, they give a lot of reasons as to why, and it's basically a giant hit piece on Unreal Engine, which is quite surprising to see people talk about it in such an open and transparent manner, but at the same time, we do see a lot of games struggle with Unreal Engine these days, and see that the engine has performance issues, particularly on PC, not being able to technically and performance-wise live up to the standards that other proprietary engines have set."
"So let's take a look.
So yes, The Wayward Realms is moving away from Unreal Engine, as having their own engine positions us to deliver a far better game.
The developer has released an update about the game that confirms the new aim will be to release it to its Kickstarter backers in June 2026."
"So yes, developer Once Lost Games has decided to make a serious change to how it goes about creating its upcoming fantasy RPG The Wayward Realms.
In a new Steam blog post, the studio has revealed that it's doing away with Unreal Engine to instead make the game on its own proprietary technology that will increase its flexibility and otherwise positions us to deliver a far better game."
"Strong words.
The full statement explains that recent fan feedback about the project has led to the change, and seemingly for the better, as Once Lost addresses how this will improve the overall whole."
"The studio has noted that their own engine will enable the game to run at 30fps on decade old laptops without dedicated GPUs, and that it will even support the same framerates on the first generation Nintendo Switch, meaning console support won't be a problem.
Adding to this is a map that is four times the size of Manhattan, loading in under one second and offering an almost instant start and load time for the entire engine that clocks 300ms, which is already more than doubled our development speed, and full community modding support being offered too."
"While this is all exciting, the catches that such a big change will mean that the game is now behind schedule and won't be made available to kickstarter backers until June 2026, and then a public early access period in the months afterwards.
Still expect further updates on the game as of December 3rd."
"So yeah, it's not very often you see a developer basically be as transparent and open about the development as they have been here.
Again, strong words to say the least.
There's some really key quotes here, positions us to deliver a far better game when talking about dropping Unreal Engine and making their own engine."
"And then they back it up with some hardware claims here where they say their own engine, unlike Unreal Engine, will allow the game to run at 30 or more fps on decade-old laptops, again not PCs, laptops, without dedicated GPUs, which is a huge claim.
And this will also be reflected on the first generation Nintendo Switch as well."
"The way they phrase that makes me think they're not talking about the difference between the Switch 1 and Switch 2, but they're thinking about the difference between the different Switch models, like the original Switch models, and how they did get slightly progressively better."
"Not very much, but slightly progressively better.
And then they go and talk about how the map is as big as it is, and that their own proprietary engine will be able to load the entire thing in under a second, and load the entire engine in a fraction of that, which again, another big claim, has more than doubled our development speed."
"So a lot of interesting things being said here about this game, and how basically Unreal Engine has been a pain in the neck for them to work with, which is why they're basically sacrificing six months worth of development to leave it behind.
Now I don't know whether you'll see something like this happen for other developers, but the idea with Unreal Engine, particularly Unreal Engine 5 when it started really taking off, was to offer this sort of all-purpose engine, a bit like Unity, but with somewhat greater ambitions."
"And the benefit of having an all-purpose engine like that is that people can be trained on Unreal Engine, they can easily swap between developers, because that was a big issue that Halo Infinite had for one, because it was built on the Slipspace engine, its own proprietary engine."
"Whenever people would come to 343 Industries, they'd have to learn how to use Slipspace.
Now if everyone knows how to use Unreal Engine, that means changing between developers and getting new jobs elsewhere, and almost having a blood transfusion with different developers.
It's quite simple."
"But the problem that we've seen over the years is that Unreal Engine hasn't been as successful in a gameplay manner as many hoped, and there's been a lot of games that struggle to perform as well as they possibly should.
And I think that's perhaps somewhat of a reason why, particularly this generation of consoles, the games don't feel like they really push the boundaries of the console, and I often think that maybe it's somewhat to do with the engines, maybe it's somewhat to do with the fact that the Unreal Engine isn't quite doing what many would hope."
"Now a lot of people are still committing to Unreal Engine, so you're going to see it around for a long while, and hopefully that means that with so much commitment to it, the performance of it will improve, but at the moment in time, clearly not, because otherwise you wouldn't see a smaller studio like this outright going out of their way to build their own engine to avoid using the established platforms."
"So interesting thing across the board really, we'll have to stay tuned and see how this works.
If they can live up to these claims that they've made about how their engine will operate, then I think it says a lot about Unreal Engine."
"Likewise, if their claims don't stand up, if their proprietary engine doesn't quite deliver these promises, we'll have to have a different conversation.
So you know, we'll have to see.
The key thing to note again though is that they won't be coming to Kickstarter backers until June 2026, and the public early access period won't be until later in the year, so we're talking late 2026, and that's just early access, so you know, you're probably looking at a launch for this game in 2028 at the earliest, and that's probably when the consoles will be supported as well, so a long while to go before we see anything more significant about the Wayward Realms, but still an interesting story nonetheless."
"Right, that's all the time that I have though, so thank you for joining me, and I'll see you all in the next YachtTV News tomorrow."
