Although The Wayward Realms is scheduled to enter early access in less than a year, the developers have surprisingly changed engines.
The Wayward Realms is not intended to be just another competitor for Bethesda and Elder Scrolls. Rather, the creative minds behind it want to build on strengths from the past that have disappeared in recent years.
Therefore, the role-playing game is intended to be a rather unofficial continuation of Daggerfall rather than Skyrim. The game has been in development for a long time, but now, somewhat surprisingly, a major change has been announced. The Wayward Realms will no longer rely on Unreal Engine 5 – instead, the team is developing its own engine.
High expectations
It sounds like a pretty ambitious plan, especially since The Wayward Realms is actually supposed to launch in Early Access very soon. Access for Kickstarter backers is planned for July 2026, followed by public Early Access a few months later.
Changing engines now seems like quite a feat for an already incredibly ambitious project. After all, this is not a modest role-playing game, but a massive open-world project with in-depth role-playing mechanics, an AI game master, and a world that adapts to your needs at any time.
On Kickstarter , the project has raised around €717,000 so far – which is not insignificant, but extremely poor for a major video game. Nevertheless, the team remains optimistic and has high expectations for the new engine.
These are the features that should be possible with the new engine
- Even on ancient PCs without a dedicated GPU, the engine should enable over 30 FPS.
- Even on the normal Switch 1, 30 FPS is possible, so they are not worried about performance on modern hardware.
- Even a huge part of the game world, which corresponds to the size of real Manhattan, loads in less than a second.
- The entire engine loads in about 300 milliseconds, which makes editing very easy and speeds up development.
- The new engine is said to offer more modding options, which will play into the community’s hands.
So far, only a few landscape images of the new engine have been shown:
Will it work?
It remains exciting to see whether the team’s plans will come to fruition. Several well-known developers are involved in the project. For example, Ted Peterson, who worked on Elder Scrolls for a long time before founding OnceLost Games – from Arena to Daggerfall as part of Bethesda, but he was also involved in Morrowind and Oblivion as an external developer.
Another of the studio’s founders and the driving force behind The Wayward Realms was Julian LeFay, another legendary developer from the early days of Elder Scrolls. However, LeFay passed away in July this year.
It will be a challenge to meet all expectations with The Wayward Realms. However, RPG fans should definitely keep an eye on the project.
