by Epic Games EVP of development, Marcus Wassmer, took to the Unreal Engine blog today to announce more details on Unreal Engine 6, which was briefly showed off at a Rocket League tournament earlier this month with little in the way of detail.
We now have a better idea of what the engine's goals are and when it is coming out. Right now, that early access date is the end of 2027, with the "full release of UE6 coming 12-18 months later."
As teased by Epic Games executives over the past few months, Unreal Engine 6 essentially combines the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) and Unreal Engine 5 into a new product. Unlike Unreal Engine 5, which heralded the arrival of a lot of new graphical features, UE6 instead focuses on evolving how games are actually developed using the engine. It also represents a reset point for the engine, with a lot of legacy systems going away in favour of more modern (and hopefully more performant) alternatives.
Unreal Engine experts will be able to go deeper into Wassmer's comments, but the broad strokes are that UE6 will gradually deprecate the Actors and Blueprint systems used in UE4 onwards, in favour of "Scene Graph" entities and an "Entity Component System", which should improve performance and inheritance limitations. The Verse programming language used in UEFN will become the primary scripting language used in the engine too. The change will be gradual, and conversion tools will aid the transition, as will better AI integration, but upon the public release the old systems won't be supported.
Given that deep-lying systems like the material pipeline, coordinate systems and gameplay frameworks will be substantially revised, developers will face sterner challenges migrating from UE5 to UE6 than they did moving from UE4 to UE5. However, that should also result in a better and more modern final result that runs more easily on multiple platforms, which ought to make the transition worthwhile.
It's still early days, with more information to come at Unreal Fest Chicago which is happening right now.