The Coalition Shows Off ‘The Cavern,’ An Unreal Engine 5 Cinematic Test Demo

The Coalition is Xbox Game Studio’s Gears of War group. They have been using the latest version of Unreal Engine 5 since its release. Along with the engine’s release, The Coalition showed off its cinematic test of the tech in a demo video called “The Cavern.”

The video does not show a finished game. “The Cavern” features a man in a dark cave, facing off with an imposing and impressively rendered smoke that moves in abrupt ways smoke shouldn’t be moving in, and a deadly creature lurks within. To defend himself from the dark dangers, the man has only a glowing, sharp crystal.

The environment featured in “The Cavern” runs on an Xbox Series X and is built with 100 million triangles. All of the reflections and lighting in the demo are rendered in real-time. This man has 160 million polygons, 31 000 in his face and 3.5 millions in his hair. It’s amazing. It all comes together in this video.

Xbox posted an interview with Kate Rayner (technical director of The Coalition) about Unreal Engine 5’s use so far. Rayner said that the team had been using the engine from before it was released to early access. They have contributed bug fixes, and collaborated with Epic Games in making UE5 more compatible with Xbox consoles. 

Rayner also talks about The Coalition’s involvement with bringing the recent tech demo The Matrix Awakens to Series X and S in December and made plenty of progress in readying the engine for use on Xbox. Rayner states, “The fact we delivered this next-generation experience on Xbox Series S featuring all the same features such as ray tracing and that we now have an Xbox Series X with an amazing level of quality is truly incredible.” This partnership resulted is improvements to Xbox’s development software. These include runtime optimizations, bug fixes and tool improvements which all benefit developers.

The “The Cavern”, a stunning looking model, is a sign of things to come for The Coalition and the other Xbox Game Studios teams. Check out more Unreal Engine 5 coverage. Then, read the news about the engine’s launch and the story on the Tomb Raider game coming from Crystal Dynamics, which is powered by UE5.