During the Unreal Engine 5 reveal last night, Epic Games announced that its popular free-to-play shooter Fortnite will be landing on PS5 and Xbox Series X at launch. In addition, the game will release on the most up-to-date version of the Unreal Engine and shift to Unreal Engine 5 in 2021.
Read: Epic Showcases Unreal Engine 5 Running on PS5 and it Looks Superb
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#63ED06″ class=”” size=”21″]“Epic will release Fortnite, built with UE4, on next-gen consoles at launch and, in keeping with the team’s commitment to prove out industry-leading features through internal production, migrate the game to UE5 in mid-2021.[/perfectpullquote]
Epic also announced that the company will continue to support cross-play across generations and all user purchases and progress will carry over to new platforms and devices. Fortnite is a massive game with more than 350 million registered players to date. In addition, Sony and Microsoft have pledged to support their current library of games on their next-gen platforms. Fortnite on the PS5 and Xbox Series X just makes sense as the game’s massive audience will look for the game should they make the jump to next-gen.
Once Epic has moved Fortnite to the PS5 and Xbox Series X the company will then optimize it. In addition, the game will make the jump to the Unreal Engine 5 sometime in 2021. This move will bring a load of visual enhancements to the experience across the board.
Epic has not revealed what they plan on doing to the game to take advantage of their “pretty-impressive” next-gen engine yet. However, the company says the will explore the full scale of hardware and software benefits on the consoles. This includes data storage management, graphical improvements and more.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“No, this is not a new version of Fortnite. It’s Fortnite optimized to take advantage of the new hardware and features on next-gen consoles. How will Fortnite take advantage of next-gen console hardware? While we can’t share specifics at the moment, more powerful hardware will allow us to improve performance and visuals.”[/perfectpullquote]
Catch up on the Unreal Engine 5 in action below;
