Virtuverse Coming To Unreal Engine 5
We’re starting from scratch; Everything about Alpha 7, and more.
A short summary of what’s to come is at the end of the post.
In June of 2021, a few months into the development of Alpha 6, we started playing around in Unreal 5. At this point, porting, let alone a complete rewrite, was just a faint dream in our minds. Today we’re excited to announce that this will become a reality — Virtuverse Alpha 7 will be using the latest Unreal Engine 5.
This does bring a good number of questions to the table: One: How long is this expected to take? Two: What other content is expected to make into Alpha 7? Three: What does this mean for other deadlines, such as the release of RCE to the game? Four: Will backers receive updates between Alpha 6 and 7? Five: Where can you follow the development process? And finally Six: Why?
Let’s start from the beginning:
How long will this take?
Expected release timeline for Alpha 7
We started full time development of Virtuverse around three years ago. It took us this long to go from a blank project in Unreal 4.21 to a sixth major update in September of this year using Unreal 4.26.
Over this three year period we’ve upgraded and expanded our technology on every other early access release, so we’re quite familiar with the process of upgrading the game to a new engine version.
That being said, we, of course, are not going to take another three years to publish Alpha 7. We know where to start, we know what works and what doesn’t, what should be improved or left out entirely. It’s hard to judge how long it will take to get to the point we are at now, but we estimate that Virtuverse Alpha 7 update will come out in the 3rd or 4th quarter of 2022.
As to why we’re doing this in the first place, we’ll talk in a little more detail towards the end of the devblog.
What content should be expected in Alpha 7
New map, new outposts, new quests
Just over a year ago we released Early Access 4 which introduced Temrance as a permanent new location in game.
Later in Early Access 5, with the introduction of community goals, player could choose what they wanted to see in a future update. The winning choice was Lost in Space, an expansion on top of the existing world, which would bring players to a brand new location on a Stig’s moon — Erewoth. Players would follow a very linear quest line, starting with crashing their spaceship into the moon, exploring the new alien landscape to find resources, and finally using them to repair their ship to come back to Stig. These were our initial plans, and we had quite a good chunk of it conceptualised, with pre-production slowly wrapping up to give way to full time development of the expansion.
With the decision to move to Unreal 5, we have also made the choice to pivot from the original idea of using the new map as a location you visit once and never come back, to using it as a new permanent in-game location — a replacement for Temrance.
For some context, although Temrance was meant to be a permanent addition to the game, much like a lot of the features in Virtuverse, it was also a learning experience for us, as well as a proof of concept that we can make larger and better themed open world maps than the very original Peninsula. We have definitely made several fundamental mistakes along the way, and in spite of the improvements we’ve made since EA4, Temrance remains on shaky foundations. This is why, rather than going through the effort of porting it and further trying to make it live up to the quality and beauty that Unreal 5 can support, we’ve decided to scrap it, and start fresh. The new Lost in Space expansion map seemed like the obvious choice to start with — we already had it designed and ready for level design.
Initially, Drauss, as the map shall be now known as, was meant to be a fairly small, perhaps just slightly bigger map than Temrance. However, with it becoming a permanent, and for the time being only, location in Virtuverse, we also significantly expanded its scope. Drauss will be much, much larger than Temrance. To be precise, the new map is no less than 4x4km in size (we might scale it up to 6x6km!), making it at least four, or potentially nine, times larger than Temrance. It will contain new, never seen before creatures, unique flora and fauna, new and much larger friendly and hostile faction outposts.
A bigger map, of course, results in more things in it, which in turn negatively impacts performance. Thankfully, however, with the use of Unreal 5 tools such as Nanite, World Partition, and others, a lot of optimisation concerns simply go away.
This naturally will take a long time to complete. Along with the rewrite of the game, this is the second biggest challenge we have facing us. But as I mentioned before, we have done this sort of thing before — we know where to start and more importantly, where to go.
As well as the new map, we’re also completely overhauling the characters. The current player and NPC meshes are of poor quality to put it lightly. There’s no better time than now to take the extra time and attention needed to bring their visual quality up to our and our players’ standards. To achieve this, we decided to use Metahuman. Along with the plethora of amazing tools and assets provided by Quixel and Epic, Metahuman allows for high quality character creation.
What does this mean for other deadlines?
Will full release, beta, and RCE be pushed back?
The short answer is unfortunately yes. However, we believe that this is entirely worth it. Along with the game stepping up to a whole new level in terms of visual quality, we have another chance to look through the entire codebase and rewrite it from nothing, to catch and fix bugs that have plagued Virtuverse since EA1, and thus bring the gameplay stability up to a point where RCE is a viable option. As it stands right now, we simply cannot flip the RCE switch on due to all of the issues that are yet to be addressed, from random inventory wipes, to bugged items, and crashes.
A high level review of the codebase has been long overdue, so with the release of Unreal Engine 5, we are wasting no time to use it as an opportunity to make a massive leap towards the beta, RCE, and eventually full release.
So to recap, yes, deadlines for our milestones will be pushed back by a fair bit, but in the long run, our main goal is to make gameplay enjoyable and Virtuverse a game worth coming back to. As to how much they’ll be pushed back? We’re not sure yet, but we will keep you updated as soon as we know.
Will backers receive updates between Alpha 6 and 7?
Where does the upgrade leave the current playtest in the roadmap?
Our plans for updates between alpha 6 and 7 have changed very little. Our goal, as usual, is to have a major content release every few months, with bug fixes and small feature updates in-between, for backers to enjoy.
We will continue to tackle some of the bigger, show-stopper bugs that prevent players from enjoying or coming back to Virtuverse and releasing these as patches before Alpha 7. Along with that, small updates, such as a few new skills, quests, or features will be released as Alpha 6.1, 6.2, and so on. These will not, however, have a public test for each of them.
However, since we’d be starting from scratch, and we want to get to it as soon as possible, we decided it’s best not to continue on major feature updates and had to push back a few of the planned changes to later Alpha releases. Namely the dungeon and team overhauls. If we find the time, they’ll come in Alpha 7, if not they should be ready for Alpha 8. As always, we’ll keep you updated through these devblogs.
And speaking of which…
Where can I follow the development process?
Regular devblogs coming your way
Between working full time on Virtuverse and the first public release with Early Access 1, roughly nine months of development had been done in private. No-one was here to see the process of creating a game from scratch.
As of today, we will be publishing more or less regular devblogs, showing off our progress with the rewrite, discuss our approach to tackling different problems, implementation of features, and bug fixing. These devblogs might get a little technical in places, but we hope to provide a unique resource for new aspiring developers as well as curious players, as to how a game of this scale and ambition can be created from the ground up.
On a more personal note, I think it’s important to remember that we’re all regular people, and that we, the programmers, artists, composers, and level designers at Virtuverse, were at some point just starting out in our journey as developers, perhaps watching Unity tutorials as kids and making silly little platformer games, or reading other blog posts, magazine articles, and write ups of games we love that inspired us to become who we are. And now that we’re here, 6 major releases in, it’s still just as humbling to read all of the positive responses we get. If there’s one thing we got right, it’s the communication we have with all of you, and through these devblogs, we hope to make that bond even tighter. Perhaps the journey, we will all take on a path to a new Virtuverse, will inspire some of you to create a game of your own.
Finally,
Why?
Why not just a port?
While in theory, porting Virtuverse from Unreal Engine 4 is technically possible, we are facing a number of issues that makes starting from scratch worth while. For one, the project files, and even the packaged game itself, contain quite a bit of bloat, unnecessary or unused files. That also includes deprecated or poorly implemented code. Adding new features is getting increasingly more difficult, as each mechanic has to play well with other, rather rigidly, implemented systems. We also feel that the visual look and feel of the game is already dated, and trying to fix it would warrant starting from scratch anyway.
So it’s really quite that simple. If there was ever a time to start over, it is now.
In Summary
TLDR
- Virtuverse Alpha 7 will be using Unreal Engine 5.
- Planned release window in quarter 3 of 2022.
- New, >16 km² map to replace Temrance and for players to explore.
- Improved character models.
- Better optimisation and gameplay performance by utilising tools provided by UE5.
- Beta, RCE, and full release are being delayed.
- Bug patches and small feature updates will still be released before Alpha 7 for backers.
- Regular devblogs will be posted here on Medium, covering every detail of rewriting Virtuverse from scratch as well as designing the new map.
Thank you for your continued support; we look forward to sharing our work with you!
— Donathan & The Virtuverse Team.
