Epic shared plans for “portable content, codes and economies” between UE-developed games, with Fortnite slated to be the first real proof of concept. In Fortnite’s case, portability will allow cosmetics obtained or purchased in-game to be used in other UE games and vice versa. Additionally, UE6’s cross-game social link feature will allow players to be connected to one game, but voice chat with people playing another.
The first part seems like a new concept we haven’t seen in other games. Buy one skin, use it everywhere. I bet they’re going to fuck it up with their greed somehow, but it’s a neat concept and provides more value to people who buy skins.
The second part, and last sentence, is basically just discord, team speak, etc. I don’t buy or use Epic’s stuff, but if I understand it correctly, some dumbass thought it was a good idea to only allow voice channels for people playing the same game 🤣🤣🤣
I will start by saying that I have no idea what their plans are and I am not a game or game engine dev.
I think what we’ll see is the model and mesh of the skins will be loadable by the game via the engine. I’m assuming they’ll have a standard that contains the hitbox and model/mesh to put on the character. Then the game dev could tweak gobally the scaling (as an example) to make all skins fit nicely into their game. Same for guns and such. But game devs who want to opt in[1] to this will have to use the engine API to make it work.
I would assume that the game itself won’t need to be recompiled or updated but rather the engine will download the newest skins in some common and reusable place. And then the engine swaps one model for another.
[1] my suspicion is that the tech will be licensed to the game makers. Especially if they plan on allowing copyright characters (like Marvel characters).
And again, please take everything I said with some salty grains or something as I am only speculating.