UEFN Updates, Disney's Strategy, and Just Driving: This Week in UGC
Welcome to another This Week in UGC. We’re officially at the end of May, which means all of June’s games industry events are just around the corner. Until then, we have plenty of excitement in the UGC world to go over.
Update 30.00 is here
As we mentioned last week, Epic was just about to release a new update for Fortnite, and we’re now living in the world of 30.00! While we didn’t get the proximity chat we were hoping for, there are some highlights worth calling out.
800 new characters: More is almost always better, and in this case, it’s easy to see how this will help creators. Coupled with the NPC Spawner, anyone creating a game with any non-player characters will have a huge, immediate increase in the variety of what they can make. For something more custom, there’s always MetaHuman.
The Spatial Profiler: It’s a bit of a mouthful, but the Spatial Profiler is an extremely cool step toward deeper performance monitoring and experience optimization. Until now, there’s been some basic metric monitoring like frame rate and memory usage, but finding the problem spots were the true challenge. With the Spatial Profiler, you get a heatmap overlay highlighting key performance impacts so you know exactly where to focus your optimization efforts. There’s no doubt that as UEFN evolves, performance will be a growing concern, so this is one that’s worth learning now.
*Undocumented!* The class limit is now 254: An intrepid Reddit user noticed that the limit for individual classes increased to 254 from the previous limit of 16. That’s a huge increase! While one can only imagine what creators could do with the full 254, exceeding 16 is extremely easy to do. Imagine a class-based hero shooter and how quickly you could design 20 or even 30 different heroes, or a linear experience where the player state changes frequently to allow the player to progress.
These are just a few of the updates - check the full notes for more.
Disney’s UGC strategy - what exactly does it mean?
Disney published an article last week about their many brand integrations and partnerships that included a brief mention of their Epic partnership, including this seemingly innocuous line: “This new universe will not only give users the chance to play and interact with Disney content but will offer them the opportunity to create their own wholly unique Disney-themed gaming experiences, too.” This opens the door to a LEGO-style creator experience on Fortnite, but LEGO and Disney are very different companies with very different approaches to brand management. So, what exactly is this likely to mean?
While it’s impossible to know exactly what’s happening in the mouse’s house, their historical approach to gaming and recent strategies can give us some clues. You may remember Disney Infinity, a series of entries in the toys-to-life trend that were successful but ultimately shut down in 2016. The games included story-driven campaigns based around their franchises, but also included a sandbox-style mode that allowed players to create and experiment with characters and items to create their own worlds. Star Wars vs. Pirates of the Caribbean? Why not!
What feels so telling about this approach is that it enabled player creativity within the confines of a predictable set of rules within the game. Those rules kept brand safety within the expectations of the broader Disney brand while still affording players enough freedom to create something unique. Confined freedom may be the exact target that Disney and Epic are aiming at.
Of course, a lot has changed in the last eight years. Disney has shifted strategy away from internal development in favor of partnerships, and other major gaming projects have been canceled. Considerably fewer games featuring Disney properties have been released in the 2020s, any many have been at a very different scale; Disney Dreamlight Valley is an excellent example, taking great advantage of the popularity of life sims and combining the familiar gameplay loop with a world inhabited by various Disney characters. Again, the game give players the freedom to own their experience, but within the confines the game sets forth.
So, will Disney’s partnership blow up the concept of confined freedom? Likely not. It’s difficult to see a future where Disney assets can be used in any Fortnite project, leading to all the predictable things that would lead to. But imagine a Fortnite experience that replicates the freedom of Disney Infinity at a fraction of the development overhead, or a game series approach that leads to universes that mash various Disney properties together however players want. There’s enormous power in this for Disney, Epic, creators, and players alike.
Just Drive and the promise of open-world racing
Your humble writer admits to being a bit of a sucker for any open-world racing game, including an extended love affair with the Forza Horizon series. The moment that Rocket Racing dropped into Fortnite, that’s exactly where my mind went. All of the pieces are falling into place for a full Horizon-style experience within Fortnite.
Enter Just Drive, which has been available for a few weeks and boasts a 4x4km map, basically every vehicle that you can fit into Fortnite, and some basic collectibles to find as you cruise around. It is, admittedly, a far cry from the complexity of a AAA driving game, but it has managed to capture a small but consistent playerbase.
Missing is any head-to-head racing, progression, car collection, etc., but what’s there serves as a nice proof of concept for the development of these features. Session-based multiplayer via existing tools, character and car unlock progression via Verse…it’s all possible. And there’s absolutely demand for these kind of games; just today Amazon announced they’ll publish a new open-world driving game from Forza veterans.
While we’re at it, can I also ask for a car-based, class-based battle royale? Give us large-scale Twisted Metal in Fortnite, please.
We’ll be back next week to talk a bit about some of the personal journeys from AAA to UGC from the Magnetik cofounders.