June 12, 2012 by Paul Curtin
Although no new consoles were announced or even teased this year at E3, that didn’t stop Epic Games from showing off the evolution of their graphics engine behind closed doors. Giving a look at what should be possible on next-gen systems, Epic showcased a ton of new features that the Unreal Engine 4 offers, which allows designing content easier than ever. And for those who just like to play games and not make them, Epic blew everyone away with the debut teaser trailer of the UE4 that they’re calling the Elemental Demo.
In similar fashion to Epic’s visually stunning 2011 “Samaritan” UE3 trailer, Epic’s latest real-time demo switches genres, moving away from the cyber-punk futuristic style Epic is known best for and teasing what a medieval fantasy game like Skyrim could look like with the Unreal Engine 4. If you’ve been on the fence about whether or not we need new consoles, just take a look at what’s possible on one high powered computer using a single video card compared to what we have now on obsolete five year-old systems and think of how much better games could be if developers were designing games around this technology.
Hopefully, at next year’s E3 we’ll come to learn that developers have in fact been working with UE4’s technology to develop games on next-gen consoles like the PlayStation 4 and Xbox 720.
