The version of Wayfinder that players are playing now, and in early access, is going to be a lot different graphically come full release, as Airship Syndicate has confirmed that they’re currently in the progress of moving the game from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5. 

• Related Reading: Wayfinder to Have Performance & Quality Modes on Consoles; DualSense Features Will Be Implemented

As revealed during a group Q&A session which MP1st attended, AJ Lasaracina, Airship Syndicate’s director of marketing, gave an update on their progress on moving to the newly updated Unreal Engine 5 and confirmed work of moving Waylander to it has already begun.  

Q: In a previous interview (conducted by Wccftech), you said you’d like to add raytracing support and possibly switch to UE5 at some point. Any news to share on that front?

A: We are switching to UE5, it’s not that we might switch to UE5, we absolutely are switching. The timeline for that is not known. It’s something we want to do before the game is fully out. But it’s in progress. We literally were talking about it on Monday. It’s already happening, and it looks beautiful from what I’m told.

As for implementing ray tracing, here’s what AJ had to say:

It’s something we’d love to add with possibly one of our partners. Our hardware partners is AMD, we do work with them in terms of just optimization, as well as FSR 2.2 is going into the game. But we would love to add something like raytracing where it makes sense in more static areas like skylight is harder to do in the random generated content because there’s so many variables. It’s also pretty taxing, but it’s something we aspire to have in a couple of places. No specific though.

What Lasaracina is completely understandable, especially the taxing part as ray tracing can be a bit of a resource hog. Maybe once the full move to Unreal Engine 5 is complete, we’ll have better ways to introduce ray tracing in games. For now, don’t expect it to be there anytime soon. 

Wayfinder is currently available to play in beta on the PS5 and PC. Early access is planned for PS4, PS5, and PC in May, with the title coming to more platforms once it has fully launched out of early access.