Revision 2

Overview

Neverness to Everness is built on Unreal Engine 5, specifically version 5.7, making it one of the first free-to-play titles to ship on this engine version. The choice of UE5 enables a range of advanced rendering technologies that bring the city of Hethereau to life with detailed lighting, materials, and world streaming. The engine underpins the game's seamless open world, which loads without any visible loading screens as players traverse the city.

Ray Tracing and Path Tracing

Neverness to Everness offers full ray tracing and path tracing support on PC. Ray tracing enhances reflections, shadows, and global illumination in real time, producing physically accurate light behavior across Hethereau's urban environments. Glass buildings, wet streets, metallic surfaces, and neon signs all benefit from ray-traced reflections.

Path tracing goes further by simulating the full path of light rays through a scene, including multiple bounces, for photorealistic results. Hotta Studio debuted the path tracing mode at Gamescom 2025, where it was showcased alongside NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 50 Series graphics cards in the "Hethereau Exclusive Feature" trailer. Path tracing is intended as a premium visual option for high-end hardware.

NVIDIA DLSS 4 with Multi-Frame Generation

On PC, Neverness to Everness supports NVIDIA DLSS 4 with Multi-Frame Generation. DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) uses AI to upscale lower-resolution frames to higher resolutions, delivering higher performance without significant visual quality loss. The Multi-Frame Generation component generates additional interpolated frames to boost frame rates even further. This technology is particularly beneficial when ray tracing or path tracing is enabled, as these features are computationally intensive.

Lumen Global Illumination

The game uses Unreal Engine 5's Lumen system for dynamic global illumination and reflections. Lumen calculates how light bounces between surfaces in real time, creating realistic indirect lighting without relying on pre-baked lightmaps. This means that time-of-day changes in Hethereau produce accurate shifts in ambient lighting, with interiors naturally darkening at sunset and neon signs casting colored light onto nearby surfaces during nighttime.

Lumen operates as the default global illumination solution on all platforms, while hardware ray tracing provides an additional quality upgrade on supported GPUs. The combination of Lumen for indirect light and ray tracing for reflections and shadows produces the game's highest visual quality tier.

Physically Based Rendering and Materials

Neverness to Everness employs real-time PBR (Physically Based Rendering) materials throughout the game world. The material system includes subsurface scattering for realistic rendering of skin, snow, ice, and certain fabrics. Rain accumulation and wet surface effects dynamically alter material properties, causing streets to become reflective and clothing to darken during storms.

Character models benefit from high-quality skin shading with subsurface scattering, strand-based hair rendering for key characters, and detailed cloth simulation. The combination produces character visuals that hold up in close-up cutscenes and photo mode shots.

Seamless Open World Streaming

Unreal Engine 5's world partition and streaming systems power Hethereau's seamless open world. The city is divided into streaming cells that load and unload dynamically based on the player's position and movement direction. This architecture eliminates loading screens entirely, whether the player is sprinting through streets, driving at high speed, or gliding between rooftops. The system is optimized for both SSD-equipped PCs and the PlayStation 5's built-in NVMe storage.

Character Model Refinement

Throughout the development process, Hotta Studio continuously refined character models for Neverness to Everness. Each playable Esper features high-polygon models with detailed facial expressions, costume physics, and unique visual effects tied to their elemental affinity. The studio invested in additional detail for hair rendering, eye shading, and accessory physics compared to their previous title, Tower of Fantasy. These refinements are most visible during ultimate ability cutscenes and companion interaction sequences.

Technology Summary