It's been a long road since it was announced... what, two years ago at least? However, we've finally hit end-game: Unreal Engine 5 has gone gold!
There's a lot of cool new shit in this release that, given how pervasive Unreal Engine is throughout the industry, we'll probably begin seeing in new release non-Switch games pretty soon; Epic have officially deprecated the old raytracing backend in favor of Lumen (their new real-time lighting system) and its raytracing features, and most interesting of all, UE5 going gold marks the introduction of Nanite.
Nanite is super cool on its own: it's a virtualized micropolygon geometry system--currently only usable for static, non-translucent assets--that allows for film-quality geometry detail (I'm talking tens of millions of polygons per object here!) on up-close objects while gracefully fading down to low-detail geometry the further objects are away from the camera with an almost imperceptible impact on performance. I'm not even remotely qualified to explain how it all works under the hood, but I do know that if they can eventually get it working for rigged dynamic meshes, it'll be an absolute game-changer, if you'll excuse the expression.
Now, I've memed them for this in the past, but with the earlier news that developers of noted dud-on-release Cyberpunk 2077 and owners of GOG CD Projekt RED are switching to UE5 for development of the next Witcher game and contributing their changed to the engine back to core, it looks like the new engine already has huge developer support, which is great for smaller indie studios and one-man-shows as it means a lot of awesome engine-level features from triple-A titles will make it back to the core releases of Unreal Engine 5.
Now, for the burning question: what sort of games do you want to see made with this new tech? Personally, I hope Bethesda finally dumped the corpse of Gamebryo and is using UE5 moving forward after Elder Scrolls 6, but we know they're stubborn as fuck so I'm not holding my breath.