Age of Empires 5 could employ Unreal Engine, prompting fears of stuttering in RTS game

With compelling history-based campaigns, Age of Empires 4 reminded players why the franchise is so popular. Still, its graphics were often labeled as cartoonish and lacking the detail of some rivals. New job ads for Unreal Engine engineers suggest that World’s Edge has a plan to modernize these visuals. However, ResetEra posters have concerns that performance in Age of Empires 5 will suffer.

Since 2019, World’s Edge has managed the RTS games for Xbox, in tandem with developers like Relic Entertainment. The new positions listed on the Microsoft job board are for a Principal Unreal Engineer, Gameplay, and a Senior Unreal Engineer, Shared Technology. The description mentions “continuing the great legacy of Age of Empires” and a need for “planning and building our future tech stack”. With both roles, experience with the game engine is necessary.

It’s unclear whether the next project will be Age of Empires 5, or a remake or remaster of an older title. Still, it seems that Unreal Engine 5 or eventually Unreal Engine 6 will become vital to upcoming releases. The change could produce more realistic visual effects than are possible with the current Essence Engine. Nevertheless, critics believe that Epic’s tools aren’t the best fit for the genre.

Unreal Engine for Age of Empires may be a strategic mistake

Unreal Engine 5 games often suffer from poor optimization that can result in stuttering and frame rate drops. The complexity of an RTS game poses additional challenges for developers. As civilizations expand and battles become grander in scale, performance may be sacrificed. Age of Empires 4 ran reasonably well on lower-end PCs at release, but that may not be the case in the future.

Gamers with older hardware often didn’t benefit when Manor Lords transitioned to Unreal Engine 5. The 2024 Medieval strategy title enjoys solid Steam ratings, but stuttering remains a complaint.