Why The Wayward Realms Abandoned Unreal for Its Own RPG Engine

The Wayward Realms is one of the most closely watched fantasy RPGs in development, not only because it’s pitched as a spiritual successor to classic Elder Scrolls entries like Arena and Daggerfall, but because it’s being built by veterans who helped define that series in the first place. Recently, the project made a striking move: after spending time in Unreal Engine, the team chose to walk away from Epic’s technology and embrace a proprietary engine that more closely fits their ambitions.

This decision touches on some of the biggest challenges in modern RPG development: how to build truly massive worlds, how to support dynamic systems that react to player choices, and how to keep development efficient while doing it. Here’s a deep dive into what this pivot means, why it matters, and how it may shape the future of this so‑called “Grand RPG.”

From Elder Scrolls Legacy to a New “Grand RPG”

OnceLost Games, the studio behind The Wayward Realms, is led by developers who helped design early Elder Scrolls titles at Bethesda Softworks. Those games were known for their sprawling worlds, deep character systems, and the sense that the simulation kept running whether you were there or not. The Wayward Realms aims to push that philosophy further, coining the term “Grand RPG” to describe a project where scope, reactivity, and player agency are pushed beyond what mainstream open-world titles usually attempt.

Official descriptions highlight several pillars that define this vision:

• A realistically scaled archipelago containing potentially hundreds of islands.
• Procedurally assisted cities and regions that are then hand‑polished.
• Complex faction relationships and shifting political structures.
• A dynamic game master–style system that adapts quests and events around the player.
• Robust character building, emphasizing skills and role‑playing consequences.

If those features sound reminiscent of what Daggerfall was reaching for in the 1990s, that’s no accident. But to execute that scale with modern production values, the team needs engine tech that works with their simulation-heavy goals instead of fighting them.

Why Unreal Engine Was the Starting Point

Unreal Engine has become the default choice for many large projects because it offers a powerful out-of-the-box toolset, a modern rendering pipeline, sophisticated physics, and a large talent pool. As Epic points out in its documentation, Unreal is designed to serve everything from high-end games to virtual production and simulation workflows, with features like Nanite and Lumen enabling detailed scenes and dynamic lighting on current hardware.¹

For a small-to-mid-sized studio, choosing Unreal can provide several immediate advantages:

• Rapid prototyping: Built-in systems let designers iterate quickly without waiting on engine programmers.
• Visual fidelity: State-of-the-art rendering tech competes with large AAA productions.
• Cross-platform support: Targeting multiple platforms is easier with an established engine.
• Built-in tools: Animation, audio, cinematics, and UI pipelines are already integrated.

For The Wayward Realms, Unreal made sense during early development: it allowed the team to mock up environments, experiment with combat, and communicate the game’s tone to backers and potential partners using familiar technology.

Where General-Purpose Engines Start to Strain

Despite those strengths, large simulation-heavy RPGs have historically struggled in general-purpose engines that weren’t built around their specific needs. Various studios have learned that a renderer-first toolset isn’t always the perfect fit for complex AI, world streaming, and systemic storytelling.

For a Grand RPG like The Wayward Realms, some pain points with a general engine can include:

• Data scale: Storing and querying huge amounts of world data, NPC states, and faction relationships can become unwieldy.
• Streaming massive worlds: Continuous open worlds spanning vast distances require carefully tailored streaming solutions to avoid loading hitches.
• Simulation complexity: Emergent behaviours from AI, physics, and scripted systems may run into performance or architectural limitations.
• Tool friction: Designers might have to navigate layers of features they don’t need, slowing iteration.

These challenges echo the broader trend in the industry: studios with particularly ambitious systems often end up building custom technology or heavily modifying existing engines. In some cases, teams find that by the time they’ve bent a general engine around their needs, they might as well have invested in a bespoke solution from the start.

Pivot to a Proprietary Engine: Back to Bethesda-Style Roots

In a major update, OnceLost Games explained that The Wayward Realms would transition away from Unreal Engine in favor of a proprietary engine based on a fork of existing open-source technology (reported externally as a customization of the Wicked Engine). The result is effectively a studio-specific engine tailored to their RPG needs rather than a generic “one size fits all” solution.²

Proprietary engines have historically underpinned many of the games that push boundaries in open-world design—Bethesda’s own Creation Engine for Skyrim and Starfield, CD Projekt’s REDengine for The Witcher 3, and Rockstar’s RAGE being prominent examples. While each of these has faced its own challenges, they demonstrate that engine control can be crucial when building highly customized gameplay frameworks.

Goals of the New Engine

The Wayward Realms’ custom engine is not just a technical vanity project; it’s being presented as a practical move to speed up development and support the Grand RPG vision. The team has outlined several goals for the new tech stack, many of which align with what veterans learned on previous Bethesda-style projects:

• Faster iteration: Leaner tools designed specifically around RPG workflows allow designers to implement and test content quickly.
• Better scalability: The engine can be built from the ground up to handle the project’s intended world size and data volume.
• System-first design: AI behaviours, quest logic, and world simulation are treated as first-class citizens rather than bolt-on systems.
• Performance control: The team can strip out features they don’t need and optimize heavily for their target platforms.

According to the developers, early internal results have already more than doubled their development speed compared to their previous workflow, largely because the tools are simpler, faster to boot, and more focused on the features their RPG actually uses.

How a Custom Engine Can Power a “Grand” Open World

To understand why this matters, it helps to look at the particular kinds of systems The Wayward Realms is promising and why they’re demanding under the hood.

Dynamic Game Master–Style Logic

One of the game’s headline ideas is an AI-driven system that functions like a virtual game master, adjusting quests, encounters, and world events based on how you play. Rather than relying solely on hand-scripted quest chains, the game aims to weave your actions into a wider tapestry of faction politics, regional conflicts, and personal storylines.

This kind of system resembles research areas in academic AI and simulation where planners and story generators dynamically compose events around a player’s actions.³ Implementing such logic at scale requires:

• Fast, flexible data structures for tracking world state.
• Efficient scheduling of background simulations without tanking frame rates.
• Tools that help quest designers understand and debug complex branching outcomes.

A custom engine can expose exactly the hooks and debugging interfaces needed for this, rather than forcing designers to work around generic mission systems.

Procedural Worlds with Handcrafted Personality

The Wayward Realms’ setting is a cluster of realistically scaled islands, many of which are shaped by procedural generation. The art and design teams then refine these spaces, adding story, landmarks, and unique encounters. This “procedural first, hand-crafted second” approach mirrors techniques explored in both industry and research to reduce content production costs while maintaining distinctiveness.⁴

Supporting this pipeline means the engine must:

• Generate terrain, settlements, and layouts from rules and seeds.
• Integrate procedural tools with the level editor so designers can tweak results in place.
• Maintain consistent navigation and AI data as the world is regenerated or updated.

Custom tech can ensure these tools are tightly integrated and performant rather than layered awkwardly on top of a third-party engine’s internal map and navigation systems.

Table: Unreal Engine vs Custom Engine for The Wayward Realms

Impact on Release Plans and Early Access

Engine switches are never trivial. OnceLost Games has communicated that transitioning to the new engine required pushing back its early access milestone. An updated schedule shared via official channels outlines a target for delivering an early build to Kickstarter backers first, followed by a broader early access launch a few months later.⁵

Delays are always a concern for backers, but open communication helps. Crowdfunded projects in particular tend to face schedule adjustments as the reality of development challenges becomes clearer. Industry analyses of Kickstarter video game campaigns have shown that ambitious projects often underestimate timelines, especially when custom technology is involved.⁶

The crucial question is whether the engine shift reduces long-term risk by giving the team a more sustainable foundation. If the developers are already seeing faster iteration and better alignment with their design goals, the short-term delay could pay dividends in world complexity and stability down the line.

What This Means for Players

For players watching The Wayward Realms as a possible successor to classic Elder Scrolls experiences, the engine pivot carries a mixture of promise and uncertainty.

Potential Advantages

• More reactive systems: A custom data model can make it easier to track and respond to player choices across a huge world.
• Better performance on target hardware: With control over every subsystem, the team can focus on the platforms they care about most and trim unused tech.
• Deeper mod potential (speculative): While specifics aren’t fully detailed, studios that control their tech can design modding hooks with fewer legal and technical constraints than third-party engines sometimes impose.
• Consistent design philosophy: Every layer of the engine can be shaped around role-playing and simulation, rather than built primarily for cinematic showcases.

Trade-Offs and Risks

• Longer stabilization period: A new engine needs time to mature; early builds may show rough edges.
• Fewer ready-made features: Systems that come “for free” in large engines (like certain networking or advanced VFX pipelines) may be simpler or absent.
• Smaller tech ecosystem: There won’t be the same breadth of third-party plugins and tools that Unreal offers.

Ultimately, the trade-off is classic: flexibility and polish from a big engine versus deep tailoring and potential innovation from a custom stack. Given the team’s background building open-world RPG tech, OnceLost Games appears confident that they can manage the risks.

FAQs About The Wayward Realms and Its Engine Switch

Is The Wayward Realms still an open-world game after dropping Unreal?

Yes. The switch away from Unreal Engine does not change the core design. The game is still planned as a large open-world (or more precisely, open-archipelago) RPG with a focus on exploration, factions, and systemic storytelling as described in its Steam page and crowdfunding materials.⁵

Will the new engine make the game look worse than it would have in Unreal?

Not necessarily. While Unreal is renowned for its high-end rendering, a custom engine can still deliver strong visuals if the team prioritizes art direction and efficient shaders. Many visually impressive games run on proprietary engines. The trade-off is less about absolute visual capability and more about where development effort is spent—on bespoke systems versus generalized rendering tech.

Does this engine change affect planned platforms?

Official platform lists haven’t been fully finalized publicly, and a custom engine does give the studio more control over where and how the game ships. However, it can also mean additional work to support each platform. Players should look to OnceLost Games’ official channels for up-to-date platform confirmations as the engine matures.

Why didn’t the team start with a proprietary engine from day one?

Early in development, using Unreal made it easier to rapidly prototype, pitch the game’s concept, and run a crowdfunding campaign with visual material. Building a custom engine requires upfront investment and clear requirements. As the team better understood the scope and technical needs of The Wayward Realms, it became clearer which parts of Unreal were holding them back and what a tailored engine could offer instead.

How does this compare to what Bethesda does for Elder Scrolls?

Bethesda Game Studios historically uses its own in-house engine technology (currently Creation Engine 2) to support large, simulation-heavy open worlds. The principle is similar: customize the tech around the specific needs of their RPGs. OnceLost Games is following a comparable philosophy—though on a smaller scale—by controlling its engine to better serve a Grand RPG-style design.

Looking Ahead: A High-Risk, High-Reward Direction

The Wayward Realms’ decision to abandon Unreal and double down on proprietary tech is bold, but it aligns with the experience of its veteran team. Building a truly systemic, reactive RPG at the scale the studio is targeting often clashes with engines built primarily for visually driven, linear experiences. A specialized engine, even if it demands more work upfront, could be the foundation that allows OnceLost Games to realize its ambitions.

For now, the project remains one of the more intriguing fantasy RPGs on the horizon. Its final success will depend not just on engine technology, but on writing, quest design, pacing, and the countless small decisions that make role-playing worlds feel alive. Yet this engine pivot suggests the studio is willing to make hard technical choices in service of that vision. If the bet pays off, The Wayward Realms could stand as a modern showcase for why custom-built RPG tech still has an important role in a landscape dominated by off-the-shelf engines.