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Unreal Engine 3 enjoyed a long, prosperous life on last-gen following its 2006 debut, but the new UE4 has yet to hit its stride in the new console gaming era. We're almost two years into the current generation, but by our reckoning, only five UE4 games are now available on PS4 and Xbox One. Without Epic itself setting the bar this time around, there's the sense that we haven't seen the engine at its best. However, with the release of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, Polish development team The Astronauts might well be the first studio to deliver on the powerful middleware's latent potential.On the face of it, the game is a PC port, but Ethan Carter's journey to the PlayStation 4 was longer and more involved than one might expect - after all, the original release was based on the last-gen Unreal Engine 3, an altogether different technology compared to its successor. While the visual quality pushed the boundaries of Epic's ageing tech, The Astronauts actually wanted to build the game using UE4 from the beginning - something that wasn't possible at the time as the engine itself simply wasn't ready. With the move to PlayStation 4, the studio seized the opportunity to move the entire project over to Epic's new platform. This transition would help make the leap to PlayStation 4 easier while simultaneously serving as a trial exercise in using the new tool-set. Now, ten months after its initial release, Ethan Carter has re-emerged on PlayStation 4 - with an upgraded PC version to follow, free to all existing owners of the game.
To give us some idea of the substantial work undertaken in the transition, The Astronauts' lead artist - Andrzej Poznanski - took the time to share his experiences with us, providing valuable insight into the development process. There hasn't been a lot of discussion surrounding UE4 projects on the current wave of consoles, so we were eager to learn more about the capabilities of the engine and the challenges and opportunities in working with it. The technology is clearly highly capable but on a constrained platform like PS4, the full extent of its entire feature-set can't be deployed at will.
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