Awakened dev bigs up Epic's next-gen engine

In our exclusive look at the reawakened Project Awakened, Phosphor Games revealed the Kickstarter-backed sandbox game will rock Unreal Engine 4 in its final build. It already looked promising in UE3, but the team hopes to be more "futureproof" with UE4, an engine it believes is the best in town.

"We switched over to UE4, in part because we knew it would look so much better right away, but also because we really want this game to have a long future, and clearly the future is next gen engines like UE4," explained Phosphor's Chip Sineni. "Like we'd hate if if in 3 years everyone is still playing Awakened but it feels old and dated.

"Being on UE4 makes it 'futureproof' for quite a while. It's the best engine available. Some of our favorite stuff about Unreal 4 is actually how great the workflow is -- it is just much easier on staff as you don’t have to do all these tricks to make it work and look good, it just does a lot of that for you. It is a more efficient way to make games."

According to Chip, we'll be able to see some great new effects the original version of the game just wasn't capable of -- as you'd expect from a next-gen engine!

"In terms of what people will notice, the abilities we are prototyping look very cool -- the fx systems allow you many more interactive particles, and our game uses these kind of effects for all the player skills.

"The character prototyping we have been doing looks much better than what we have shown -- create-a-character is one of the hardest things to get to look right, because you have all these separate pieces coming toegteher that never quite fit right, which is why games with pre-defined characters usually look so much better. With realtime ambient occlusion, the better shaders and lighting, everything just sits together a lot better."

A huge part of Awakened is the ability to craft your perfect videogame hero, giving it a look, personality, and range of abilities suited to your exact specifications. Getting that working properly is going to be paramount to Awakened's success, so it's good to know UE4 apparently makes it so!

[Check out our full exclusive on Phosphor's Awakened Kickstarter drive.]