How to make retro low poly landscape for open world?

Development World Creation
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Hello! I have a question about creating an open world in the style of retro Low Poly. Basically, I want to create a landscape with a low poly count. For example, the landscape of nature in games like Half-Life, Return to Castle (2001), San Andreas, Gothic 1. Angular mountains, straight joints from the ground to the rocks, etc.

After spending a lot of time looking for a solution to this problem, I realized that it is easier to create a photorealistic landscape in Unreal Engine than something simple from the past XD. And actually, that’s why I decided to ask this question on this forum.

Is it even possible to create a retro low poly landscape for an open world in UE5? When creating the landscape, I tried choosing Section Size 7x7 so that the landscape would have fewer polygons, but I realized that this heavily loads the system and does not lead to the desired result. I also tried creating a landscape with more standard settings, and at the same time set the maximum LOD0 value, but this still did not create the effect of low poly with sharp edges and sharp corners.

I also suppose that I could try to create the necessary terrain in Blender and then export it to UE5, but the terrain I have in mind for my project is too large to create entirely in Blender. I really hope there is a way to create it inside UE5.

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Id think reducing the section count in terrain editor would be the way to go, but if blender works better for you just try sculpting smaller chunks of landscape. one thing you could look into though is level streaming, for larger open worlds this is the way to go as you can stream in chunks of the world as the player approaches them

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These tutorials were of great help in my personal projects, you can apply the same principles using lower poly count assets.

Alternatively, its possible to se the landscape tool to sculpt out your level, then export it, send it to Blender and use a decimate modifier to make it suitably for low poly, then import it back to UE, and use the mesh as its collision.

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