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Message: [QUOTE="Bombastus, post: 92380, member: 2178"] Kojima Productions revealed PHYSINT's new poster on September 17, 2026, with MetaHuman and Epic Games notices in its legal fine print. Those credits immediately fed reports that Hideo Kojima's espionage game had moved to Unreal Engine 5 after Sony stopped publishing it. The jump sounds tidy, but the evidence does not actually close the case. Xbox's accompanying announcement named Bill Skarsgård as the lead and described PHYSINT as using cutting-edge technology. Kojima Productions used similarly broad language. Neither company named Unreal Engine 5, Decima, or any other game engine in the announcement. Speculation makes sense because [B][URL='https://goldmidi.com/community/threads/sony-cut-physint-funding-in-zoom-call-kojima-said.77755/']Sony's PHYSINT funding withdrawal[/URL][/B] changed a relationship that had connected Kojima Productions with PlayStation. Decima belongs to Guerrilla's technology stack, while Kojima's studio now has Xbox publishing the project. Even so, no public statement says Sony revoked PHYSINT's Decima access or that Xbox required an engine change. [HEADING=2]MetaHuman credits are weaker evidence than they look[/HEADING] MetaHuman is closely associated with Unreal Engine, but it does not follow that every project using MetaHuman technology must run its entire game on Unreal. Character capture, facial rigging, digital likeness work, animation data, rendering, physics, world streaming, and gameplay systems can sit in different parts of a production pipeline. A logo for one component does not identify every component around it. Death Stranding 2 is the useful reality check. Kojima Productions' own technical staff discussed building the game with Decima, while 3Lateral publicly described its work on the same title as using MetaHuman standards for lifelike characters. The team calibrated facial assets with extra likeness data from 4D scans and scan-based texture sets. In other words, Kojima Productions has already shipped a Decima game containing MetaHuman-related character technology. The broader field of [B][URL='https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10753']facial animation built for production pipelines[/URL][/B] also treats digital faces as a chain of representations, controls, capture methods, and animation tools rather than one indivisible engine choice. Seeing MetaHuman in PHYSINT's credits therefore proves an Epic technology connection, not the renderer underneath the whole game. [HEADING=2]The Epic trail started before Sony left[/HEADING] The timing makes the poster argument even less decisive. Kojima Productions publicly revealed its PHYSINT collaboration with 3Lateral in September 2025, when the project was still being developed with PlayStation. The studio was already using the Serbian character specialist to work on highly detailed actor likenesses. Sony did not notify Kojima Productions that it was ending the PHYSINT arrangement until June 2026. Epic-linked character technology was therefore in PHYSINT's production pipeline many months before the publisher changed. It cannot, by itself, be evidence that the Xbox deal caused a sudden move to Epic technology. This distinction gets lost because 3Lateral has been part of Epic for years and its work feeds directly into the MetaHuman ecosystem. From the outside, "Epic technology" and "Unreal Engine" can look interchangeable. Inside a production, one may describe a character pipeline while the other describes the engine running the game. The new poster may still reflect an expanded MetaHuman role. Kojima also said the team conducted costume fittings, scans, and camera tests with Skarsgård and Charlee Fraser earlier this year, so character digitization is clearly active. None of those details identify the engine used for environments, gameplay logic, streaming, lighting, or final runtime. [HEADING=2]Unreal remains plausible but unconfirmed[/HEADING] Unreal Engine 5 is an obvious candidate. Kojima Productions already uses it for OD, another Xbox-backed project, which means the studio has current Unreal experience and an existing technical relationship with Microsoft around that production. Reusing knowledge and tooling could make practical sense if Decima is no longer available for PHYSINT. Practical sense is still not confirmation. Decima access is governed by agreements the public has not seen, and neither Sony, Guerrilla, Xbox, nor Kojima Productions has published the licensing terms that now apply to PHYSINT. Claims that Sony "pulled" the engine go beyond what has been officially disclosed. An actual engine switch would also raise questions the poster cannot answer. Work made for one pipeline may need conversion, rebuilding, or replacement, but the cost depends heavily on how far production had progressed and which systems were already engine-specific. PHYSINT spent much of 2025 and early 2026 on casting, scanning, and foundational work, so outsiders do not know how much engine-dependent material exists. For now, the precise wording matters. PHYSINT is confirmed to use MetaHuman-related technology and to work with 3Lateral. Unreal Engine 5 remains a credible possibility, especially after the Xbox publishing change, but the game engine itself has not been announced. [/QUOTE]

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