Kaile Hultner I think out of all of the trailer dumps and showcase days, Tuesday might end up being the strangest. That’s mostly because one of the big events of the day was neither a trailer dump nor a showcase – instead we could liken it to a WWDC-style keynote where the main thing being shown off was geared more towards game developers than anyone else.
The State of Unreal event took place pretty early on as it was hosted at Epic’s Unreal Fest gathering in Orlando, FL and thus three hours ahead of every other west-coast-oriented event. At this event, we were treated to an Unreal Engine 5.6 technical demo set in “The Witcher 4” – which I put in quotes because as much as it clearly hyped everyone up for CD Projekt Red’s new upcoming game, I would feel ethically unsound if I told you that it was in any way representative of the game itself, or even like a vertical slice of the game’s current development build. More than likely it was specially made for the keynote, specifically to show off Unreal’s new tech – which is fine. But I saw some folks talking about it like it was an actual first look at The Witcher 4, and like… C’mon.
Unsurprisingly, Unreal Engine looks incredible, and the demo was insane to look at, at once needlessly hyperrealistic in the AAAAAAAAA sense and somehow also very painterly to behold – CDPR’s flourish, I’m sure. They broke down some of the tech being used to create lush, dense forests and a realistic horse’s musculature patterns, using terms and phrases like “nanite” and “chaos flesh” to talk about what was going on. At one point, a presenter called the simulated movements of a crowd “over 300 animated skeletal mesh agents, going about their business,” which I thought was very funny. They made a big to-do about NPCs engaging in simulated, vocalized performances meant to mimic realistic conversations and actions even while the player wasn’t looking or was otherwise occupied, and like, it was neat, but it seems like a lot of compute power being expended to simulate an unobserved reality most players would never care about or engage with (Any_Austin notwithstanding).
Of course, these kinds of tech keynotes aren’t the venue for philosophical discussions regarding the utility of NPC actions, so rather than brood too heavily on that we were promptly whisked away to talk about some of Epic’s other offerings, like Metahuman: an advanced, highly granular in-engine character creator with an in-depth expression editor and – I guess this is new to the system – markerless motion capture. Honestly, this was the coolest part of the demo for me, as – assuming it wasn’t faked for the sake of the presentation – it showed off a rendered character moving with the actor in real time, mimicking their facial expressions flawlessly and with barely any latency. A friend of mine talked about how much of a boon this would be for indie 3D story games, and like… yeah, I could see it.
I think what was refreshing about these two tentpoles of the keynote was that neither of them mentioned “AI” like… at all. Understanding that level design is work, as is motion capture and character creation, and being able to see tools used to perform this work without dubious “AI-powered” shortcuts gives me a small kernel of hope about the direction games are headed. That being said, this is still Epic we’re talking about, so after the tech stuff was fully out of the way they spent the last half-hour of the presentation talking about all the ways they’re still artisanally slopifying video games. During the Fortnite update section I heard the phrase “DEEP IP INTEGRATION” and blacked out, so. Super cool. (Also as Aftermath reported there was some AI bullshit later. Like I said, I blacked out after Deep IP Integration.)
A couple of hours later was the Media Indie Exchange Summer Game Showcase, a 100-minute long trailer dump showing off a bunch of indie games, many of which looked anywhere from just alright-to-pretty cool indeed. We saw some well-known titles in the presentation, like Pathologic 3 and the Fangamer rerelease of OFF, alongside some genuine surprises. The first title shown in the presentation was a Final Fantasy Tactics-style isometric TRPG called Never’s End, developed by Hypersect, that looked really, really cool; it was immediately followed up by a game called Becrowned that looked like what Silent Hill 2 would be if they found an off-brand James Sunderland at Aldi and went “good enough.”
Some other notable games I saw were Dead Finger Dice, helpfully subtitled “A Billionaire Killing Game,” which had this killer 1-bit aesthetic and gave me vibes crossing Inscryption with Return of the Obra Dinn; Airframe Ultra, which seemingly combines BLAME! with Wave Race or Jet Moto; Elusive, which you could liken to Little Nightmares or Grounded; Autonomica, an ostensible farming simulator that also has a PVPVE extraction mode? And Titanfall mechs??? I don’t know what the fuck’s going on here but it was sick; Esoteric Ebb, a game likening itself to Disco Elysium but with a D20 and D&D stats; and Death Howl, another tactics game similar to Into The Breach but with deck building and apparently soulslike elements.
But by far the game I ended up being the most hype about was Troublemaker 2: Beyond Dream, a game I can only describe as “indie Yakuza/Like a Dragon, set in Indonesia, with seemingly some visual novel elements and chock full of ancillary shit to do, as is tradition for one of these games.” Crane games, karaoke, wacky sidequests and fucking heat actions were shown off, as if that wasn’t laser-targeting me directly. It looks like there’s a demo out, and the game’s predecessor is like eight bucks right now and like $11 as part of a “made in Indonesia” bundle. Genuinely seems to be no reason not to check this stuff out.
If you want to check out the presentations yourself and potentially see stuff I didn’t talk about that you think is interesting, check out the links below. Next up on the docket is the PlayStation State of Play scheduled for 4:00 PM CST/2:00 PM PST today. I’ll be live-posting my reactions over on Bluesky and paying Patreon members can come chat about this and every presentation during SGF Week in No Escape‘s Discord!
See you later!
