Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra, a new game coming to the best games consoles in 2025, was shown at State of Unreal at GDC '24 and it's wildly impressive. Epic Games used the Marvel 1943 trailer to showcase the new tools coming in Unreal Engine 5.4. The game's footage, some in-game, is impressively photo real and demoed new features, including new Nanite and volumetric rendering tools. Below I share some behind the scenes video breakdowns of how the trailer was made.
Live at the event the Skydance Interactive devs showed how they made use of Nanite Tessellation to deliver near photo real visuals, with Marvel's Captain America (Drew Moerlein) and Black Panther (Khary Payton) resembling their Hollywood actors perfectly. Facial animation is scarily realistic, with small ticks and quirks bringing the performances to life.
The dev team at Skydance Interactive has also been using Unreal Engine 5.4's Sparse Volume Textures for animation and real-time streaming, which reduces the drag on memory. On the Unreal Games blog we got some detail on what you're seeing in the Marvel 1943 trailer: "Heterogeneous Volumes render volumetric assets with cinematic quality and self-shadowing, with volumes casting shadows onto hard surfaces and composited with other translucent effects such as fog and particles."
Marvel 1943 also makes use of the latest MetaHuman assets and MetaHuman Animator tools, which really does bring to life the performances of the heroes up on screen. The performances were captured using high-res 4D scans of the actors created in using tech from 3Lateral, and then the subtly and drama was developed by Skydance Interactive's animators to support the game's narrative beats.
Skydance Interactive's Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra sees the return of award-winning writer and director Amy Hennig, who created the Uncharted series of Sony. She told Eurogamer: "Working with the MetaHuman process, we have been able to honour our amazing actors' performances and faithfully transform them into equally powerful digital performances."
Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra is scheduled for 2025 and will also feature Megalyn Echikunwoke as Wakandan spy Nanali, Marque Richardson as Howling Commandos' soldier Gabriel Jones, Lyne Renée as Julie, an ally in the French Resistance, and Joel Johnstone playing Howard Stark.
What's coming in the new Unreal Engine 5.4
Behind the Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra showcase was really an excuse to demo the new tools and upgrades coming to Unreal Engine 5.4 this April. Epic Games has shared some of the updates devs can expect, including an upgrade to its Nanite tool in the form of an 'experimental Tessellation feature' that will mean you can create "higher visual fidelity without making meshes larger on disk," according to the Epic Games blog.
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Animation is also a major feature of Unreal Engine 5.4, as seen in the Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra footage. The new update brings Motion Matching to Unreal Engine 5; this is a simple way to enhance animation and has been proof tested in Fortnite since Chapter 5 - the idea is you can drag and drop pre-made animation into your sequence to smooth out transitions. Epic Games will launch over 500 AAA-standard animations later this year for everyone to make use of, including locomotion and traversal datasets.
Added to this, Epic Games is refining Unreal Engine 5's built-in animation tools, with additions and updates including a new Modular Control Rig, Automatic Retargeting, reorganised Anim Details, and an overhauled Sequencer.
If you want to know more about Epic Games' dev tools, read our Unreal Engine 5 explainer, as well as our Unreal Engine 5 review for our view on the latest release. Or, read my interview with Nightingale's art director Neil Thompson, who told me Unreal Engine 5 is the "highest form of sorcery".
