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Confirmed Engine
Project Windless runs on Unreal Engine 5. This has been confirmed through KRAFTON press materials and was already in use for the "Nhaga Eater" concept trailer released in September 2022, years before the game's formal announcement.
What UE5 Enables
Unreal Engine 5 provides the rendering pipeline for the game's large-scale battlefields. Combined with KRAFTON Montreal's proprietary Mass Entity AI tools, the engine handles real-time rendering and AI processing for thousands of characters simultaneously.
The State of Play trailer was captured on PS5 Pro running pre-alpha builds. The footage showed detailed character models, particle effects from weapon impacts, and large open environments with long draw distances. Performance specifics (framerate, resolution targets) have not been announced.
UE5 Features
KRAFTON has not detailed which specific UE5 features they are using. Unreal Engine 5 includes systems like Nanite (virtualized geometry), Lumen (global illumination), MetaHuman (character creation), and World Partition (large-world streaming). Whether Project Windless uses any or all of these is unknown as of February 2026.
Development Context
UE5 is the standard engine choice for current-generation AAA titles, particularly for open-world games with large environments and complex character systems. The KRAFTON Montreal team's background at Ubisoft, where proprietary engines (Anvil, Snowdrop, Disrupt) are the norm, makes UE5 a practical choice. The team gets Epic's tooling and optimization support rather than building engine technology from scratch, which matters for a new studio still growing toward its target of 150 employees.
The Nhaga Eater Concept Trailer
The earliest public footage of the project was the "Nhaga Eater" concept trailer, released in September 2022. This was created using Unreal Engine 5 in collaboration with Design Director Iain McCaig, the Hollywood veteran known for designing Darth Maul. The trailer was a proof-of-concept rather than gameplay footage, but it demonstrated the visual style and tone that KRAFTON Montreal was targeting. The quality of that early UE5 work helped set expectations for the State of Play reveal three years later.