Interview
April 27, 2026
Crafting the urban open world of NTE: Neverness to Everness with UE5 across PC, PlayStation 5, and mobile
Hotta Studio previously developed the globally released open world game Tower of Fantasy. Tower of Fantasy features a light sci-fi art style with anime aesthetics and was created with Unreal Engine, providing players worldwide with a rich and diverse open world gaming experience.
Following the success of Tower of Fantasy, Hotta Studio wasn’t just looking to build another game. They wanted to push the boundaries with an experience that gave players an unprecedented sense of immersion. Their latest project, NTE: Neverness to Everness, is an urban open world RPG set in the modern metropolis of Hethereau, where supernatural anomalies and everyday life co-exist.
To bring their ambitions to life, Hotta Studio stuck with Unreal Engine and upgraded from UE4 to UE5 to take advantage of features like Lumen, Nanite, Procedural Content Generation (PCG), and World Partition. The result is a vibrant, massive world where players can zip through neon-lit streets in customized sports cars, investigate supernatural issues, and engage in high-octane combat.
From PC and PlayStation 5 to mobile, NTE: Neverness to Everness stands to deliver a cross-platform experience that looks just as good regardless of where players play. So, how did Hotta Studio leverage the full suite of UE5 features to achieve their goals?
We sat down with Kee Zhang, Producer and Head of Hotta Studio to learn more.
To bring their ambitions to life, Hotta Studio stuck with Unreal Engine and upgraded from UE4 to UE5 to take advantage of features like Lumen, Nanite, Procedural Content Generation (PCG), and World Partition. The result is a vibrant, massive world where players can zip through neon-lit streets in customized sports cars, investigate supernatural issues, and engage in high-octane combat.
From PC and PlayStation 5 to mobile, NTE: Neverness to Everness stands to deliver a cross-platform experience that looks just as good regardless of where players play. So, how did Hotta Studio leverage the full suite of UE5 features to achieve their goals?
We sat down with Kee Zhang, Producer and Head of Hotta Studio to learn more.
Thank you for joining us! Could you please provide a brief overview of NTE: Neverness to Everness?
Kee, Producer and Head of Hotta Studio: NTE: Neverness to Everness is our fresh take on the urban open world genre. The game is set in Hethereau, a modern city where supernatural anomalies and everyday life coexist. Players step into the shoes of an "Appraiser," acting as an anomaly hunter who resolves supernatural issues throughout the city. We aim to offer a blend of high-freedom urban lifestyle—like purchasing real estate or managing shops—combined with a lighthearted, anime series-style narrative experience to provide players with an unprecedented sense of immersion.
Courtesy of Hotta Studio
From deep urban exploration to high-octane supernatural combat, NTE: Neverness to Everness seems to offer players a lot of gameplay variety. Can you tell us a bit more about what players can expect?
Kee: Our goal is to build a living city. Players can zip through neon-lit streets in deeply customized sports cars or walk into various fast-food joints and convenience stores for interaction. Regarding combat, the Esper system is the core. Different characters possess unique abilities like manipulating gravity, time, or shadow. These abilities aren't just for combat; they interact physically with the city environment, making exploration and puzzle-solving dynamic and reactive.
Courtesy of Hotta Studio
After choosing Unreal Engine 4 for the studio’s debut game Tower of Fantasy, why was sticking to Unreal Engine and upgrading to UE5 the right choice for NTE: Neverness to Everness?
Kee: Our team was one of the early adopters of Unreal Engine in China, so we've built up a deep well of expertise with the technology over the years. Unreal Engine is the industry-leading engine for a reason—it keeps pushing the envelope, and UE5 is a perfect example of that. Features like Lumen, Nanite, Virtual Shadow Maps (VSM), PCG, and World Partition are genuinely groundbreaking, giving us the tools to build world-class experiences without reinventing the wheel. Given everything our team already knows about the engine, combined with what UE5 now makes possible, it was a natural fit for NTE: Neverness to Everness.
How have Unreal Engine 5 features empowered the team to create the vast and vibrant open world?
Kee: UE5's World Partition gave us the ability to create vast, seamless worlds with ease. The PCG system helped us rapidly populate the world with buildings and vegetation. The Mass system does the heavy lifting for large crowded scenes packed with NPCs and vehicles, and Lumen gives us fully dynamic global illumination and reflections that look stunning without requiring a ton of manual setup. Together, these systems let us build something truly expansive without the team getting buried in busywork.
Courtesy of Hotta Studio
Tell us about the art style of NTE: Neverness to Everness. What were the inspirations and how did Unreal Engine help to realize this in real time?
Kee: We are pursuing a stylized, surrealist modern urban aesthetic. The inspiration stems from our development experience with Mirroria, the primary map during the Tower of Fantasy 2.0 era. That was our first foray into developing a large-scale cyberpunk city, and it was incredibly well-received by our players.
The environments in NTE: Neverness to Everness are lit beautifully. Can you tell us about what lighting solutions were used in Unreal Engine and how this enabled artists?
Kee: We use Lumen, Sky Lights, and environmental reflections as the backbone of our indirect lighting—that's where the color bleeding and ambient reflections come from. For crisp shadows, we layer cascaded shadow maps, distance field shadows, and screen-space shadows together to nail everything from sharp silhouettes to smooth hard-to-soft transitions for key lights and fill lights.
On the volumetric side, we use volumetric clouds, fog, and light shadows to manage weather and large-scale atmospheric shifts. We also layer in distance field ambient occlusion, contact shadows, local fill lights, light maps, and post-processing to dial in the details and overall look.
What really makes the workflow sing is the WYSIWYG editor environment—our artists can see exactly what they're going to get, make changes in real time, and iterate incredibly fast right inside the editor.
Courtesy of Hotta Studio
What can you tell us about the diverse cast of characters and their unique Esper abilities? Which Unreal Engine features were central to building the Esper Cycle mechanic?
Kee: The Esper Cycle mechanic is at the heart of what makes character combinations feel deep and meaningful. Every character brings unique abilities that work both in open world exploration and in combat as part of the Esper Cycle. For example, our beloved Eibon shopkeeper Hotori can pause time in the open world, and freeze enemies in combat, while she and any Lebenstamm flowers she triggers as part of the Esper Cycle remain unaffected.
Another example is the character Skia, who can sink into his own shadows, letting him slip under vehicles and through obstacles, flanking enemies to gain the upper hand in a fight. Another character, Nanally, uses anti-gravity to traverse vertical terrain like flat ground, and in combat she uses elevation and aerial positioning to land devastating strikes.
UE5 features like time-stop effects, motion blur, real-time lighting adjustments, and frame freezing gave us the robust technical foundation we needed to actually bring these abilities to life.
Courtesy of Hotta Studio
Can you please speak to the animations in NTE: Neverness to Everness and how UE5 helped you achieve them?
Kee: For the animations in NTE: Neverness to Everness, we emphasize symbolism and emotional expression. Rather than striving for absolute physical realism, we pursue the ultimate magnification of visual tension and character charisma.
Combat animations focus heavily on contours and silhouettes. Our design ensures the character’s silhouette remains clear and recognizable at any given frame, even when paused. We intentionally avoid complex overlapping or occlusion. Movements are designed with sufficient exaggeration to amplify both emotion and power.
On the technical side, we use UE5’s animation templates and animation layering as our foundation. By integrating engine-native features such as Motion Warping, Motion Matching, and Contextual Animation, we have built a robust animation asset configuration pipeline. This has significantly enhanced our development efficiency for the animation production on NTE: Neverness to Everness.
Courtesy of Hotta Studio
Can you share one example of how UE5 feature(s) helped the team reduce iteration time and/or lower production costs during the development process? If possible, please quantify the impact.
Kee: NTE: Neverness to Everness is a dense urban open world. There are buildings and vegetation everywhere, and keeping all of that updated and consistent by hand would be a production nightmare. Using UE5’s PCG system, we built an automated pipeline that generates vegetation, road networks, and city buildings using a visual, node-based approach driven by data logic. Scene updates and iteration cycles that would've taken days manually can now be turned around in a fraction of the time. It's had a significant impact on how quickly we can experiment with and refine the world.
NTE: Neverness to Everness is coming to PC, PlayStation 5, and mobile. Were there any specific UE5 tools or features that you leveraged to optimize the game across platforms?
Kee: UE5's cross-platform architecture is very impressive. At its core is an efficient, OS-agnostic multi-threaded task scheduling system that powers things like multi-threaded rendering, async resource loading, and physics. It scales well and is able to squeeze real performance out of whatever hardware you're running on. For optimization, Unreal Insights has been an indispensable tool. It lets our developers identify CPU, GPU, memory, and other bottlenecks quickly and accurately across every platform. Having a single, powerful profiling tool that works across the board has been a huge time saver.
How do you strike a balance between developing cross-platform for PC, PlayStation 5, and mobile when it comes to things like UI and menus?
Kee: We go with a philosophy of unified logic, layered presentation. The core business logic is shared across all platforms to keep the experience consistent. For the UI, we built an adaptive system that dynamically adjusts layout density based on screen size. As for interactions, we strictly follow the native design rules of each platform. The goal is simple: no matter which device players use, it should feel like a native experience built just for that platform, not a quick port.
Courtesy of Hotta Studio
What were your goals for shipping on mobile and how has Unreal Engine helped you achieve this?
Kee: NTE: Neverness to Everness is a supernatural urban open world RPG, and our goal for mobile is straightforward: we want the experience to stand alongside what players expect from PC and PlayStation 5—not be a lesser version of it. The soul of Hethereau is in its dense, layered architecture, its vibrant atmosphere, and its sophisticated lighting. We can’t cut corners on any of that.
Captured on mobile
Our two core targets for mobile are:
UE5 is critical to achieving both of those:
Kee: UE5 offers robust support for mobile platforms with advanced features such as Mobile Deferred Shading, World Partition, PCG, Niagara GPU particles, GPU scene-based dynamic batching, and GPU-driven instancing culling. These technologies provide a powerful foundation for developing NTE: Neverness to Everness on mobile.
Top-tier visual performance: We want the lifelike dynamic lighting and shadows, and the energy of the urban environment, to come through on a phone screen at a level that genuinely feels next-gen.
Performance and battery life, in balance: Players should be able to explore Hethereau for extended sessions without their phone getting hot or the frame rate stuttering. That means optimizing for energy efficiency across the entire system.
Performance and battery life, in balance: Players should be able to explore Hethereau for extended sessions without their phone getting hot or the frame rate stuttering. That means optimizing for energy efficiency across the entire system.
UE5 is critical to achieving both of those:
Powerful open world editor (World Partition): This gives us a solid foundation for managing a dense, expansive urban environment like Hethereau without the engine buckling under the weight of it.
Flexible, open source pipeline: UE5's Mobile Deferred Shading Mode and its open architecture give us the ability to customize deeply and optimize for the specific demands of NTE: Neverness to Everness, which is very important for managing the high-bandwidth requirements of a world this dense.
Efficient culling and scene management: Hethereau has tens of thousands of meshes. UE5's octree-based frustum culling, cluster-based light culling, and GPU-driven instancing culling dramatically reduce the rendering load on mobile hardware, which is essential for hitting our performance targets.
Flexible, open source pipeline: UE5's Mobile Deferred Shading Mode and its open architecture give us the ability to customize deeply and optimize for the specific demands of NTE: Neverness to Everness, which is very important for managing the high-bandwidth requirements of a world this dense.
Efficient culling and scene management: Hethereau has tens of thousands of meshes. UE5's octree-based frustum culling, cluster-based light culling, and GPU-driven instancing culling dramatically reduce the rendering load on mobile hardware, which is essential for hitting our performance targets.
Are there any UE features that were particularly useful for creating the game on mobile?
Kee: UE5 offers robust support for mobile platforms with advanced features such as Mobile Deferred Shading, World Partition, PCG, Niagara GPU particles, GPU scene-based dynamic batching, and GPU-driven instancing culling. These technologies provide a powerful foundation for developing NTE: Neverness to Everness on mobile.
Captured on mobile
What are your best tips for other developers considering Unreal Engine to develop a cross-platform game, especially on mobile?
Kee: UE5 offers robust support for cross-platform development. Many of its features have been thoughtfully designed from the outset to accommodate the unique requirements of various platforms. With the frequent updates to the engine, technologies once exclusive to PC and PlayStation 5 platforms are increasingly becoming available for mobile devices as well.
Additionally, UE5 provides extensive official mobile documentation, enabling developers to quickly learn and use the tools and technologies essential for cross-platform development. We consider UE5 to be an outstanding commercial engine, ideally suited for creating next-generation games across diverse platforms.
Did the team take advantage of the UE documentation, Epic Developer Community, Epic Pro Support, or other parts of the ecosystem like Fab throughout development?
Kee: Yes, Epic Pro Support helped us solve technical hurdles during deep engine customization. Epic’s technical experts provided invaluable advice on performance optimization, which accelerated our adaptation of new UE5 features.
Thanks for your time! Where can people go to learn more about NTE: Neverness to Everness?
Kee: Players can visit our official website and follow our official social media on X/Youtube/Instagram/Tiktok and Facebook. We are sharing more details on the exploration of Hethereau and new gameplay demonstrations.