Unreal Engine 6 is all about Generative AI, Fortnite and the Verse

Epic Games have released an explainer on their plans for Unreal Engine 6, including tighter integration with Fortnite along with generative AI.

Written by Epic developer Marcus Wassmer, the news post goes into a fair bit of technical detail on their plans. As many suspected, it's unifying Unreal Engine 5 and the Unreal Editor for Fortnite into a single product - Unreal Engine 6. This sounds like it's going to be such a massive change that developers may need to do a fair bit of relearning with it, or switch to something else (like Godot perhaps).

Epic continue trying to build up their own version of a metaverse, and with this they're introducing what they call Verse. They say it's a "next-generation programming language purpose-built to power massive, persistent game worlds at scale, where global state just works, and transactionally correct concurrency is handled by the runtime". This comes along with Scene Graph, their new gameplay framework.

It sounds like a big thing here is making things as portable as possible. They're leaning more into open standards. Some that already exist like glTF that Wassmer said will become "first-class formats within the engine", but for those specifications they feel they need to create Epic will make those "open specifications with Verse APIs, defined asset conventions, and documentation that any engine, tool, or studio can implement against".

To prove their own point, Epic Games will be opening up Fortnite cosmetics to a more open system in Unreal Engine 6, so other games can pull them in and use them and for developers to make outfits that work inside Fortnite.

As for generative AI, it seems like it will have some pretty deep roots inside Unreal Engine 6. Wassmer notes that "for UE6, we see LLMs, generative AI models, and tools like Claude and Codex playing a central role in helping you build content faster while maintaining the creative control you need" giving developers the ability inside to "mix and match the best leading-edge models and build custom integrations of all sorts on an open Unreal Engine 6 MCP foundation". And goes on to mention what they've been investigating with AI and LLMs in the background.

Again, it's all about the metaverse, or the Epicverse, or whatever they want to brand it as. Unreal Engine 6 will let developers continue to ship standalone, but they will also be able to ship directly into Fortnite (or both).

It would be quite problematic if more developer chose to only ship via the Fortnite Verse, especially for Linux because it's one of the games blocked by the anti-cheat. Although, Epic Games are hiring to improve their anti-cheat on Linux. So Fortnite may work on Linux one day perhaps.

When to expect it? Unreal Engine 6 should come in Early Access at the end of 2027. A full release they expect 12-18 months later.

See more in the Epic Games post.