Motivation
At the moment the features are aimed at a single issue: at the past I've created minecraft mods and modpacks and found the whole experience way harder than it should be! The minecraft modding community have great people that work hard to create the best pieces of art that are possible within the game's limit, and I've seen masterpieces over the years (thaumcraft, create, gregtech, botania, too name a few) but sadly, due to many problems related to the game not being made for mods since the beggining, these mods often encounter many roadblocks, and sometimes are not updated for recent versions (I'm not even going to touch the multiple modloaders drama), thus forcing the player into deciding tradeoffs that should not exist in the first place. Aside from that, the lack for tooling and standards for mods make the development harder for the devs.
Mods
Wouldn't it be awesome if you could just launch the game and download the mods from a good, trusted and official distributor? Without needing to install loads of software just to download that neat little mod that adds a small feature? You don't need to tell me, of course it would be awesome! That's one of the goals, making mods as simple as possible for the user to use, without needing to relaunch the game, without needing to install anything other than the game itself!
Modpacks
Have you ever encountered a game with mods and modpacks? If you are here, reading this, I would risk to say that you already had, and speaking from my own experience, the whole process of installing and playing a modpack never goes smooth, almost always you will encounter problems during the installation, having to download mods from different sources, having to download the modpack on a different platform, and all other sorts of issues that are not pleasant at all. And here comes another big objective of the engine, creating a smooth experience for modpacks! Since mods are going to be officially supported, so does modpacks! Expect the same experience from mods, no frustrations, no bumps during installation, a complete new modded experience just a mouse click away (maybe two or three), and all of that without even relaunching the game!
Development
Hello my dear voxel developers, no need for examples, you know the frustrations of creating mods for games, specially those that where not created taking mods in consideration. I offer you a complete development environment without any additional costs, not paid tools, not paid editors, everything that will be used for creating the official game will be available for you! Take a look at what you should expect:
Scripting vs Compiling
So, we know the big difference that scripting can make in a game, when you compile something you need to, well, compile it, but with scripting that's a totally different beast! Leave the boilerplate to the engine, you don't need to optimze anything that already exists or implement the most basic of features! Just write down your scripts and let the engine handle that for you, focus on content, not the details surrounding the code. Remember that I've talked about installing mods without reloading? Well that's because of scripting and hot-reloading! And guess what, you can also benefit from that too! The engine/game ships with all the editor tools, and these include the same capabilities, but tailored for development! Edit your mod/modpack on the fly and don't worry about the little details.
Tooling
A powerful and complete set of tools made to let you materialize your imagination! From performance profilers to special editors to handle complex tasks, expect it all. And at the end of the day, everything is stored using plain text, so if you don't like the editors or find it easier to just write code/config, go for that.
Standards
Nothing new here, everyone knows that the things that work on this world have standards defined, Unnamed Engine is no different, and that extends to mods, yes, standards take some degree of control out of your hands but that's absolutelly necessary. Standards allow the developer to expect a smoother development without too much surprises and a better default compatibility with other contents, it also lets the player use almost everything together without unknown effects.
Performance
Last but biggest topic of the list, the elephant in the room, performance... What is possible inside a voxel game, what can be simulated? What can't? What are the limits? These types of worries are common when playing almost all simulation games, that evil bastard called TPS that always limit our ambitious plans to make complex interactions. But fear no more, UE takes a very different and exotic approach to that, allowing for a imense boost in performance never seen before. (more on that later since that is the topic of my college thesis, so it is actually being researched and developed)