There's always a game or announcement at State of Unreal at Unreal Fest that captures the imagination, and this year it's No Law from developer Neon Giant, best known for its indie hit The Ascent. Why? Because it promises to be the 'densest' most alive open world yet made, where detail matters more than size. The cyberpunk shooter uses core Unreal Engine 5 tech, such as Nanite, Lumen, MegaLights, and Mass Framework, to bring its vast, deep city to life.
Last year we saw The Witcher 4, and I was front row for the reveal, but where that game was traditionally about being bigger, this year No Law went the opposite way and showed how UE5 tech can be used to make dense, detail-rich, reactive spaces feel alive – Neon Giant's Tor Frick even said there are more objects visible in one frame of No Law than in all of its previous game, The Ascent.
State of Unreal is a great place to see how new tech announcements can be packaged into a jaw-dropping game reveal that makes the news accessible. This time it's an immersive first-person shooter that builds its depth and realism around procedural generation, Nanite, MegaLights, Lumen and a bespoke Unreal Engine 5 workflow.
Rather than aiming for scale, No Law is a game built around density and complexity. Its city, Port Desire, is a sprawling cyberpunk megalopolis rife with gangs, corruption and enough neon to keep your graphics card sweating. "We didn't want the largest world, but the densest," said Frick at State of Unreal. "A city that feels lived-in at every scale, where every corner carries history, and every surface tells a story."
According to the developer, the focus is on making Port Desire feel lived-in, reactive and worth exploring, which sounds obvious until you remember how many open worlds are really just large spaces filled with repeat activities. Bigger isn't always better, and it's been a hot debate for years now – I love Crimson Desert, but it really does devolve into a treasure hunt and tick-sheet completionists' dream.
Neon Giant is more focused on density, interiors, environmental storytelling and whether it can create interesting spaces rather than simply making them larger. The aim is to build a lived-in city at every level and in each corner the player wanders into, in a statement Frick says: "We knew that our best starting point would be building a game around the core feature set of Unreal 5, because a small team like ours needs to work with the engine, not against it. We realised early on that “out of the box” wouldn't be enough. We had to push beyond the defaults and build our own workflow within UE5 to make the world we wanted."
Player actions will leave visible marks on the city, and individual districts are being crafted with their own identity and purpose, with tech like Lumen and MegaLights being used to drive gameplay – if you break street lamps, use torches, or plunge areas into darkness, the game's AI will react.
"As a relatively small team, that ambition came with real challenges. We wanted extreme detail everywhere, but we also needed stability and performance without having to hand-optimise each location. For us, the answer wasn't a single system, but a shift in how we built the world," said Frick.
But every open-world game claims it'll be reactive, immersive and packed with detail. The challenge is actually delivering on those ideas once players get their hands on the controller. What's different here is that a small team is setting out to create that density from the outset and harnessing new UE5 tools to make it happen.
"We prioritised density over scale, and we built a pipeline that lets artists handcraft spaces without constantly stripping detail back and without relying on procedural generation. Nanite is what made that approach viable. It lets us keep a high level of detail across surfaces without treating every asset as a tradeoff between fidelity and performance."
Visit the No Law Steam page for more details.
