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PayPalEpic 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.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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All I REALLY REALLY REALLY hope is that this enshittification of the engine DOES push more and more devs into tools like godot, just as liam said.
Understood.
Unreal 6 is more about interoperability and deploying same game and characters on more platforms, the merging of UE and UEFN.
Kimyrielle 2 hours ago
So happy for Godot. :D
Dmitri Seletski 1 hour ago
lemme guess, you want UE6 games, you gotta have 32GB video card?
On the other hand, AI generated narratives, I see how it could work.
Liam Squires-Hand 1 hour ago
Quoting: tarmo888Liam's AI-hate is showing.What an odd thing to say. The article is mostly quoting Epic directly when it comes to the AI stuff. I didn't give even a single personal written thought on the AI side. You're blinded by your own bias.
PlayingOnLinuxphone 1 hour ago
Quoting: Jarmerue5 is already the worst engine on earth for performance, still to this day.It is not. Just look at Gothic Remake, made with UE5.4, which runs performant as many customers told. Except game crashes I heard nothing bad ... and this is something the dev-team will work on beside other things.
A game is not just done by the engine team, but also the game studio and both have to care for performance. When a game studio thinks "oh nice an engine that takes away annoying work from us, so I do not need to optimize anything", than it is the fault of the game studio, not the engine. Same for studios that want to optimize, but did not learn the new optimization methods.
I don't want to defend Epic, especially nowadays when they start to enshittify their engine. I could not use UE5.7 on my Linux system, because they broke the whole GUI!! That is what we should cry about. Some slop-coded stuff that makes the engine unusable. Every action became a double-, triple- or quad-click, window drag and drop is no longer etc. People saw it on the source code change (months before 5.7 got released) and Epic did not care about. Some people on Windows are also affected btw. Furthermore their Epic Games launcher had similar issues that also include ingame "browser" used with Epics integration and even Meta Human on 5.6 Windows version where many people could not login into the metahuman stuff. These are the real issues, not the performance. Performance issues are pure misinformation and/or misconception.
But I indeed worry about UE6. They open the gates for slopification and a microtransaction hell. Hey, it will be so great to sell ugly generated skins in a skin generating game, so that it can be used in Fortnite and other games. I could make money without spending much money, nice. ... I knew Epic will destroy the engine at some point. And UE6 seems to be the start.
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).If I need to relearn things, it is still easier to stay on UE6 than switching to Godot, which has a completely other and worse workflow. Don't get me wrong, Godot is a cool project and I also used it for a project, but it makes things more complicated. It is like switching from Adobe Photoshop to GIMP. At least on the current state.
Kimyrielle 1 hour ago