ey up, its been a while.
im embarking on a new project aiming to complete and release in about a year. Should i start on UE5 or UE4?
Ive done some prototyping on another engine but feel the graphics quality is lacking so im switching back to unreal after a long hiatus.
ide love to hear an answer from an unreal dev. i know how long it took from ‘Rocket’ to a workable version of UE4 so im concerned about UE5 timeframes.
Cheers
UE5 isn’t totally ready for “full” production, there’s no knowing what’s going to break between starting work now and full release early next year.
That being said if you’re after a great presentation while having limited resources, UE5 is definitely better than UE4. Lumen just kind of “works” for great lighting in many cases, and Nanite makes things look great for cheap, if you’ve got a rather specific workflow in mind (kitbashing only basically). So maybe if you don’t mind spending a few months to figure out what you’re doing before you really get into it, I’d go with UE5. It should be fully released and stable for a decent while before you’re planning to release.
No. Don’t use a beta, you’ll have problems and they won’t be easy to solve.
If you want to finish and publish a game, go with stability.
What engines have you been developing on since 2014 - Unity / Godot / Other?
How to break this to you gently… UE today feels a lot like 2014. 
Remember the problems with vehicles back then? Well now its the entire Physics system that’s fubar.
I predict there will be chaos / frustration for Indies hoping to ship complete games in the coming year (excluding simpler projects maybe). Meanwhile the Community as a whole has tanked, splitting off into 10-20 different channels. That’s thanks to Epic’s indifference since 2017 (after Alex Paschall left). So its going to be harder to find reliable info.
Basically Epic will fix whatever Epic needs for Fortnite. And as for everything else? Who knows. But I wouldn’t bank on shipping a game in UE5’s first official year of release. So what about sticking with UE4? Again, who knows. Recent versions of UE4 have started to feel like its partying back in 2014 all over again. So a lot depends on what kind of stability Epic offers with 4.28 and anything after. And what your own expectations are…
UDK got extra fixes that overlapped with UE4 into 2015. But Epic still left a lot of crucial things broken and ultimately just moved on and forgot about UDK. So what will happen this time around? 
Here’s some telling side-reading to link into the above…
Unless there’s something you actually need in UE5 then stick with UE4. The main new graphical features require higher minimum requirements so if you don’t need those then you’d be using the same graphical feature set that’s already available in UE4 so there would be no reason to use an early access engine that’s not as stable.
^This^…