Survival Sandbox MMO Mortal Online 2 Will Be Making The Switch To Unreal Engine 5
StarVault is looking to take Mortal Online 2’s visuals to the next level as it announces its plans to upgrade the survival sandbox MMO to Unreal Engine 5. According to the studio, the move will make Mortal Online 2 one of the first large-scale games to make use of Epic’s latest game engine and will give the development team access to a new set of ground-breaking tools.
“We here at Star Vault have been hard at work readying Mortal Online 2 for this important and exciting upcoming chapter for some time now,” the studio said. “Unreal Engine 5 will grant us access to many things, with a big one being the new dynamic global illumination lighting system known as Lumen, which enables highly detailed and atmospheric realistic lighting.”
Switching to Unreal Engine 5 will also apparently do wonders for the game’s weather system and speed up loading times. “The upgrade will also allow us to use the new virtualized geometry system known as Nanite,” the studio explained. “With the use of Nanite, we can use a near infinite amount of polygons on many of our models without impacting performance, bringing the best looking sandbox MMO on the market to a whole new level of detail.”
“On top of exciting leaps forward in visuals, the new tools available in the engine will also bring many benefits to our development speed and also gameplay, including improvements to level streaming, making traveling through the world a much smoother experience without needing to load and unload large areas of the map, optimizations that will further polish the experience of the game in many areas, as well as a new sophisticated weather system inspired by weather patterns from real life,” the studio added.
Improvements to the weather system will also allow players to harness the power of the elements and influence the weather through the Elementalism school of magic that’s will be added at some point in the future.
You can check out the key features of Epic’s newest game engine and a PlayStation 5 demo showing them off in the pair of videos below.
