Bohemia Interactive, the creator of DayZ and the Arma series, has unveiled its new engine—"Enfusion"—with a public website and a video showcasing its impressive capabilities. The studio confirmed that "any potential new Arma game" will be built in this engine.
Bohemia's shooters have a strong simulation bent, with complex systems married to impressive (and taxing) graphical fidelity. Bohemia is looking to maintain that high standard with Enfusion, while also lowering its demands on hardware.
"Games built with Enfusion will run much better than before," Bohemia said. "We want your 16-core PC Master Race builds to sweat, but we also want to make sure everyone can enjoy their content across various builds and console generations."
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It also seems Bohemia is looking to make more of a splash in the console space with its future projects. The retail edition of DayZ has been its only console game to-date, and was made with a prototype version of Enfusion (the game was "a hybrid of old and new technology," Bohemia says). With regards to future console releases, Bohemia stated:
"They don’t have to [release on console] but they can, as the engine runs on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox. Enfusion-built games don't have to be 'ported' and can be developed for all three platforms at the same time while sharing a common code base and assets."
That quote also segues into the other big focus of Bohemia's announcement: ease-of-use for developers. Enfusion will support asset creation through open-source programs like Blender, and it will also feature a dedicated modding backend, with Bohemia indicating it would like to embed its own workshop for mods directly into its future games.
That Bohemia is so keen on touting the developer experience with its new engine indicates to me that it is keen on modders and other studios adopting it in the future. No doubt Bohemia would like to do everything possible to provide for another runaway modding success, like the original iteration of DayZ.
Enfusion's promises are especially interesting in comparison to Epic's Unreal Engine 5, recently shown off in the console-only Matrix Awakens demo. In addition to the expected bleeding-edge photorealistic graphics, both Epic and Bohemia are promising hardware scalability and developer ease-of-use, perhaps providing welcome relief to both devs and players in an age of constant crunch and silicon shortages.
About 30 engineers and programmers are working on Enfusion, with eight more open job postings on Bohemia's website.
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