OnceLost Games, a studio that includes developers who previously worked at Bethesda on Daggerfall and The Elder Scrolls: Arena, identified the problem and abandoned Unreal Engine 5 for The Wayward Realms project.
After studying many meaningful comments, we made an important but exciting decision: we are completely abandoning Unreal Engine and creating our own engine. This step gives us the necessary control and flexibility to create the gameplay you told us about.
The Wayward Realms now runs at 30+ FPS on decade-old laptops without a GPU, provides almost 30 FPS on Switch, and 60 FPS on PS5 and XSX. Loading a map four times the size of Manhattan now takes less than a second. The new engine will also provide full support for mods and Linux.
The studio promised to show a video with graphics on Wicked Engine in a few weeks.