Epic Games revealed the iteration of its game engine, Unreal Engine 6, as a teaser for Rocket League. At Unreal Fest, Epic has now detailed three core features of what UE6 will entail, and none of it entails any improvements to graphical prowess, unlike Unreal Engine 5 brought along.
The core idea of UE6 is unifying Unreal Engine and the Unreal Editor For Fortnite (UEFN), the custom subset of UE designed to get novice modders to create content for Fortnite based on UE tools.
So with UE6, the programming model will switch to Verse. It’s close enough to C# and Python, the usual programming languages for game development, and can “transactionalize” C++ code. Verse is designed “to power massive, persistent game worlds at scale, where global state just works, and transactionally correct concurrency is handled by the runtime.” On paper, massive games that require multiple servers should be less of a headache.
The second feature set is raising some eyebrows, which is the promise of having “content, code, and economies to become portable and interoperable across games, ecosystems, and engines.” The succinct example of this is that Fortnite cosmetics that players have the entitlement to can be used in any UE6 game that implements the feature.
In the early 2020s, the hype around the metaverse and its blockchain integration was the idea of owning digital items that in theory can be brought over to any game. The reality, of course, is that different games operate differently with different codes and game engines that require assets to be created from scratch most of the time, as the blockchain only contains the “receipt” of ownership, rather than an actual digital model.
UE6’s idea of making it easy for Fortnite skins to be implemented in any UE6 game is bringing back that old metaverse idea all over again. Fortnite can be more than just a place where IPs congregate as it is today, but also assert its influence outwards to other games, despite the post downplaying it as such as saying “this isn’t really a Fortnite story. It’s about proving that such a mature, complex system can work at scale.”
The most eyebrow-raising feature set coming to UE6 is.. generative AI tools integration, including code generation. Yeah. That being said, some use of AI for automation of laborious manual workloads are understandable additions.
In comparison, Unreal Engine 5’s core features were enhancements to make bigger and better open worlds. The jury’s still out on that, the biggest Epic-supported open world game running UE5, The Witcher 4, is still not out yet.
Any game developer and studio can still ship games with UE5.
Unreal Engine 6 will launch first as an Early Access release at the end of 2027, with the full release coming between in 12-18 months later.