Multiplayer VR Freeroaming with standalone applications

Development Pipeline & Plugins
, ,
1

Hi everyone,

Our studio has extensive experience with Unreal Engine, primarily in VFX, and we’re now branching into VR development with an ambitious project: building a proprietary multiplayer, free-roaming VR experience targeting both PCVR and standalone headsets.

We understand that many VR studios lean toward Unity for performance reasons, but we’re committed to delivering high-end visual quality — and we believe Unreal Engine is the best platform to achieve that. Our goal is to develop a custom, proprietary solution that prioritizes graphical fidelity while pushing the boundaries of current VR hardware.

Of course, we’re aware of the limitations of today’s standalone headsets. While Unreal may not be the most optimized engine for this use case right now, especially on standalone devices, our key question is:

Is it technically feasible to develop this kind of experience in Unreal (even with extensive tweaking and optimization)? Or are we simply too early in terms of hardware capability and engine efficiency for this to work well?

We’d greatly appreciate insights from anyone who’s worked on or explored multiplayer, free-roaming VR projects, especially those targeting standalone headsets. And if anyone has information on Epic’s investment or roadmap for VR optimization in Unreal, we’d love to hear it — that could help shape our direction moving forward.

Thanks in advance to anyone willing to share their experiences or advice!

2

Hi, thanks for reaching out about this. Creating high-quality standalone VR visuals is certainly possible in Unreal. Titles like Red Matter/Red Matter 2, Moss, Blade and Sorcery: Nomad are some good examples. (I’ve shipped standalone VR titles using Unreal Engine prior to my role here at Epic, too).

Standalone headsets have performance and feature constraints, and optimization will be necessary for whatever content you create. As with any performance-demanding or cutting-edge content, profile early and often on your target hardware. Exactly which tradeoffs and techniques are most relevant will depend on visual and immersive priorities.

A good place to start would be the XR development documentation provided by the folks here at Epic. Here are some links:

We’ve also published articles on the Epic Developer Community (EDC) about VR/XR, which may be of interest to you as well. Search link: VR, Published by Epic, with results including resources like:

As for what’s next: Epic is focusing heavily on mobile performance for Unreal, which will benefit VR. We’re also collaborating with Meta to optimize standalone OpenXR devices.

I hope that helps!