Rumor: The Coalition’s Kate Rayner Now Works With All MS Studios To Optimize For Unreal 5

We have an interesting update on The Coalition that should interest anyone who plays games on Unreal – but especially if you have an Xbox.

Jez Corden revealed on both of the latest episodes of the Xbox Two podcast and The Iron Lords podcast that Kate Rayner has been promoted out of The Coalition.

Kate Rayner was vice president and technical director at the studio, and in that capacity, was a major leader in the studio’s efforts to get the most out of Unreal Engine 5. She was there when The Coalition released the now famous The Matrix Awakens demo, used to demonstrate Unreal Engine 5 running on both the Xbox Series X|S and the PlayStation 5, and as it was rumored, on the still-unannounced Nintendo Switch 2.

She was interviewed in Xbox Wire two years ago, when The Coalition had just released their latest demo, The Cave. This interview does give us a better idea of how The Coalition does what they do, but you can just watch the demo below to see what they do.

We quote Kate below, describing how the team has made use of Unreal Engine 5 tools Lumen and Nanite:

“You can see the impact of Nanite already in our cinematic tech test, which enables full-quality movie assets to be rendered in real time. This means that our artists can create assets with tens of millions of polygons, scalable to scenes with billions and billions. The details are just incredible, more than 100 times what was possible before. Just looking at the eyeball detail the number of vertices and polygons are the equivalent of what an entire character would have been in the previous generation of games.

You also see how we’re doing new things with light. Fully dynamic real-time global illumination lighting has been a long sought-after feature, but up until now, it’s not been possible on console. Lumen is a total game-changer.”

Today, Kate is head of her own division within Microsoft. Her job is to work with the other Microsoft owned studios to get to The Coalition’s level when it comes to using Unreal Engine 5.

Given that the rumor going around is that The Coalition’s next game has such stunning graphics that it will be known as the ‘this is true next-gen’ moment, that means a lot of Microsoft’s slate of titles. It’s possible that the first few first party games coming to Xbox Series X|S this year, not just Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2, but the likes of Avowed, have already benefited from this new division’s help.