Mr.Mumbles: Here's a first look of what we can expect from Unreal Engine 5. Say what you will about Epic's dealings in the game store place, they definitely know how to make great game engines.
It would be nice if Unreal Engine 5 designers could get the basics right this time around. Compared to UE1-3, UE4 had two main issues:-
1. Completely dumb default key bindings. Whilst it's normal to mirror WASD onto cursor keys, Epic decided to make L&R cursor key
turn by default (instead of strafe), so for a typical left-handed keyboard & mouse player, you end up with two ways of turning - one in each hand - but can't strafe in either... And since games devs are chronically lazy and reluctant to add in-game rebindings in half of modern games, this requires manually hacking UE4's input.ini files to upgrade that shiny new 2012 engine's keyboard input from 1992 to 1997 era functionality...
2. Default FOV lock change. Whereas Unreal Engine 1-3 had a "FOV_Y lock" (meaning an extra wide screen = more width content is added), Unreal Engine 4 changed that default to having a "FOV_X lock" meaning an extra wide screen = the width is fixed but the height is cropped & zoomed (ie, you see less content at 2560x1080 than 1920x1080 (and less at 3440x1440 than 2560x1440)):-
https://www.reddit.com/r/ultrawidemasterrace/comments/b9yykh/epics_ue4_engine_default_settings_will_make/
Screenshot examples:- UE1 Deus Ex (16:9) -
https://i.imgur.com/MJNu1Gl.jpg UE1 Deus Ex (21:9) -
https://i.imgur.com/RbxLmxS.jpg UE2 Bioshock 2 (16:9) -
https://i.imgur.com/SAIZxXr.jpg UE2 Bioshock 2 (21:9) -
https://i.imgur.com/56lRuFa.jpg UE3 Bioshock Infinite (16:9) -
https://i.imgur.com/8AZngmm.jpg UE3 Bioshock Infinite (21:9) -
https://i.imgur.com/p3VVMXb.jpg UE4 Supraland (16:9) -
https://i.imgur.com/ZRDHmMR.jpg UE4 Supraland (21:9) -
https://i.imgur.com/Ni8YdxM.jpg Again, this requires games devs to manually override the FOV_Lock but since
A. Many don't have Ultrawide's to know to test for that and
B. Many are chronically lazy and rarely go back and fix it post-launch (only after they've been made aware of the problem), a lot of UE4 games are remarkably broken for UltraWide, and UE4's new defaults ended up being a huge regression vs even 22 year old UE1...