'[It] is going to change a lot about how games are made': Epic merges Unreal Engine 5 with Unreal Engine for Fortnite to give game devs around the world Unreal Engine 6

It's been six years since Epic first launched Unreal Engine 5, and at its State of Unreal event in Chicago today (head to 1h 40 mins in the above video) and in a separate blog post, we got our first look at what the next major release will offer to games, film, TV, and more industries. And it turns out that the biggest direction for the changes in the new engine came from Fortnite and UEFN.

If you're unfamiliar with the latter, it's basically a version of Unreal Engine 5 that's somewhat simplified and pared back to allow anyone to make levels or entire games for Fortnite. It's hugely popular and honestly very simple to use. I introduced my partner to it a few months ago, and despite having no experience in game development whatsoever, she created a fully functional Fortnite map and game mode within a day.

The sheer usability of UEFN is core to the changes in Unreal Engine 6, and when I talked to Epic at last year's State of Unreal event in Orlando, it explained that the separation between UE and UEFN would eventually go, with the two combined into a single package and offering the best of both worlds.

In the words of Tim Sweeney, it's "UE 5 plus UEFN equals UE 6, plus some more cool stuff on the way." The idea behind the merge is to allow developers to create something and then ship across every possible platform/store at the same time, including Fortnite itself. The unification also involves bringing APIs and code together across all of the various additions that Epic has for UE, such as MetaHumans.

That said, Fortnite isn't really going to be the showcase for Unreal Engine 6; that honour goes to Rocket League, and the very first glimpse of it all was dropped last month at the Paris Major event of the RL Championship Series.

Perhaps the most significant change in Unreal Engine 6 is the move to open standards for tools, code, APIs, etc. This isn't something that can be wholesale implemented overnight, and I suspect that not every element will be open in this manner, but the end goal is to give developers (games or otherwise) an easier path to getting content and code out to Epic's and external ecosystems.

Epic didn't say anything about specific features in the keynote, so no idea if there will be a major change to Lumen, for example, but it did say that UE6 is targeted for release at some point in 2027 ("2027-ish" was the exact phrase, though the blog post says "Early Access release at the end of 2027").

It also said a few things about Verse, the scripting language used in UEFN, and how the gameplay programming model in UE6 will be shifted to that language (though C++ will still be there underneath it all). Directly related to that will be something called Scene Graph, which will replace the current gameplay framework used in UE5. That will be built entirely on Verse, and with it, Epic plans to "build a full distributed software transactional memory system" for huge, interactive live worlds.

That won't mean anything to gamers, but for developers, it means that their "game code can be written as if it were running on a single machine without needing to coordinate custom networking code all over the place."

And naturally, AI is going to become a bigger feature of Unreal Engine, with the first step being taken in the new UE5.8 release and its MCP server plugin. That system will let you set up any LLM you want to use and give it various tasks to perform, from simple code refactoring all the way up to generating a full 3D scene that you can then tweak as required.

There's more to all of this, of course, but there's not quite enough information yet to glean any insight as to whether the step from UE5 to UE6 will be as dramatic as the jump from v4 to v5 was. My feeling is that it won't be, from a PC gamer's perspective at least, but game developers will probably relish the thought of having an Unreal Engine that's easier to use and quicker at producing the content required.