Wayward Realms Ditches Unreal Engine 5 For Custom Engine

In a major development shift, OnceLost Games has announced they are abandoning Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) for a proprietary engine to realize that massive vision. The studio confirmed the pivot is designed to solve modern performance issues and deliver a "far better game" that honors the scale LeFay helped conceptualize. While the move aims to strictly improve the final product, it has pushed the release window back significantly, with Kickstarter backers now expected to gain access in June 2026.

The decision to leave Epic’s ecosystem highlights a growing fatigue within the PC gaming community regarding Unreal Engine 5. We have seen several high-profile launches sour quickly, with titles like Silent Hill f, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, Oblivion Remastered, and Mafia: The Old Country facing immediate player backlash. 

Steam reviews and forums for these titles were dominated by complaints regarding shader compilation stutter and framerate drops, cementing a perception among some gamers that the engine is currently too heavy for widespread consumer hardware.

While Unreal Engine 5 hasn't been confirmed as the sole cause for all these struggles, as seen with developer Sandfall’s Clair Obscur, many players are laying the blame at its feet. OnceLost Games noted that transitioning to a proprietary engine, specifically a fork of the open-source Wicked Engine, provides the specific control and flexibility needed to avoid these common complaints regarding stuttering and high resource demands.

Wicked Engine Performance and "Eyjar"

According to the studio, the rewards for this transition are massive in terms of accessibility and optimization. The new custom engine is reportedly capable of achieving over 30 frames per second on decade-old laptops without dedicated GPUs and running smoothly on first-generation Nintendo Switch consoles. This ensures the game can run on older hardware while retaining its visual targets. 

Furthermore, the studio claims the engine allows for the loading of "Eyjar," a static map four times the size of Manhattan, in under one second. This technical leap will support a sprawling open world which features over 100 procedurally generated islands and cities. The developers stated that this switch has already more than doubled their development speed.

To further deepen its connection to classic Bethesda RPGs, the game will feature complex systems for climbing, spellcrafting, and factions that are fully accessible to modders. The new engine includes full community modding support external to the core systems, utilizing a public scripting language inspired by C#. 

This architecture is intended as a tribute to the Daggerfall Unity community and is designed to foster a long-term, player-driven ecosystem similar to the ones that have kept games like Skyrim relevant for years.

This engine migration inevitably comes at the cost of the schedule, forcing the team to miss their previous end-of-year targets. Under the new roadmap, backers will receive access in mid-2026, with a public Early Access launch following a few months later. 

It is a risky tactic for a game so far along in development, but one that may win over gamers tired of unoptimized releases. At the very least, it is a worrying sign for Epic Games that indie developers are choosing to delay their own projects to build custom technology rather than rely on the industry standard.