Hello Unreal Engine community, I’m Marcus Wassmer and I lead the development team at Epic Games.
If you were watching the Rocket League Championship Series a few weeks ago, you might have noticed a familiar logo with a 6 on it. We wanted to provide a first glimpse of Unreal Engine 6 before we shared our engine development plans with fellow developers at Unreal Fest Chicago.
UE4 opened the engine up to everyone. UE5 reinvented how we build worlds. UE6 is about evolving how we ship and operate them.
Our approach with UE6 is shaping up quite differently from how we developed UE4 and UE5. Over the next two years, we'll be unifying the two major streams of Unreal Engine development—UE5 and Unreal Editor for Fortnite—into a single product: Unreal Engine 6.
This post is an early look at where we're taking the engine and why.
If you were watching the Rocket League Championship Series a few weeks ago, you might have noticed a familiar logo with a 6 on it. We wanted to provide a first glimpse of Unreal Engine 6 before we shared our engine development plans with fellow developers at Unreal Fest Chicago.
UE4 opened the engine up to everyone. UE5 reinvented how we build worlds. UE6 is about evolving how we ship and operate them.
Our approach with UE6 is shaping up quite differently from how we developed UE4 and UE5. Over the next two years, we'll be unifying the two major streams of Unreal Engine development—UE5 and Unreal Editor for Fortnite—into a single product: Unreal Engine 6.
This post is an early look at where we're taking the engine and why.
What is UE6?
In short, UE6 is UE5 and UEFN coming together into a single, unified engine for the next generation of gaming.That said, UE6 will keep doing the things you want Unreal Engine to do. Rendering will keep getting better. Cook times will come down. Iteration loops will get tighter. Mobile is increasingly capable.
But UE6 exists distinctly from an incremental UE5 development path because three things about game development need to change at the same time:
- We’re moving the gameplay programming model to Verse, which transactionalizes C++, for increased accessibility of development and so that we can build persistent, large-scale, live experiences with thousands of contributors.
- We’re enabling content, code, and economies to become portable and interoperable across games, ecosystems, and engines through open standards, to enable developer collaboration on much greater scales than ever before.
- We’re building development pipeline features such as an MCP with integrations for Claude, Gemini, and others, as creativity and productivity multipliers so that teams can focus their efforts on the essential creative and technical tasks of development rather than time on time-consuming manual tasks.
A new gameplay framework
UE6 will include an entirely new gameplay framework known collectively as Scene Graph, built from scratch on Verse. Verse is the foundation for Epic’s future programming model. 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. Scene Graph is a modern, high-level gameplay framework that will give you a true foundation for creating games and experiences easily, and sharing their interoperable components between games.Verse draws ideas from functional, logic, and imperative languages, and should feel immediately familiar to anyone who has worked with languages like Python or C#. But it also has some unique features, aimed at solving the complexity and scaling problems of modern game development—starting with its unique software transactional memory model.
All functions in Verse run as part of atomic transactions, which can be rolled back and resimulated when needed. These transactional semantics also extend to any C++ code that is called from Verse. For now, to make all this work, Verse runs on a single thread and calls C++ code built via a custom LLVM compiler that automatically transactionalizes the C++ code. In principle we can extend this method to automatically run transactions concurrently on different threads, but we have some work to do to get there on hardware that will scale appropriately.
The more interesting thing this enables for large, live worlds is that with UE6, we're working to build a full distributed software transactional memory system. We intend to take the existing single-threaded-style Verse game code, then distribute it across multiple servers automatically. When an object is needed on one server in the cluster, the Verse runtime rolls back the current transaction, migrates the object to the appropriate server, then re-runs the transaction with the object now present.
The magic here is that your 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. Behind the scenes, many servers can be spun up to distribute the work automatically. Our early prototype work is promising and has shown that we can both write ‘single-server’ code and get performance scaling out of distributing the work transparently.
Even better, the distribution and the transactional semantics make saving game data way simpler. The Verse runtime can automatically synchronize and save any global state for the program, and share that state across all running instances of a game or ecosystem.
To the game programmer, this means that setting up something like save state for a player is as simple as defining a single global map of player to saved state. No more having to set up databases and coordinate schemas between your game and other backend services. You can do all of this without ever leaving Verse. You can see the early stages of this at work in UEFN’s weak_map persistence features which are forward compatible with the general purpose method described here.
We think all this together results in a really powerful new programming model for the future.
You’ll see all of this roll out incrementally in UEFN and UE6 as we make progress towards unifying the two products.
Portable content
Now, let’s talk about the second guiding principle of UE6: Content and code should be portable across games and engines. Our goal is to give the games industry a whole new way to grow our ecosystems with cross-promotion, portable player value, and to really lean into all of the positive-sum dynamics that Metcalfe's Law predicts for connecting experiences and social graphs together.We’re going to do this with a determined effort to move UE beyond just extensibility and into open specifications for interoperability. Where existing standards such as glTF or USD are capable of fulfilling UE6’s needs, we will make them first-class formats within the engine. Where a standard doesn’t yet exist that serves the needs of game ecosystems, we will open up Unreal Engine’s own systems as open specifications with Verse APIs, defined asset conventions, and documentation that any engine, tool, or studio can implement against.
Fortnite cosmetics will be our first real proof point of portability. We will start by moving the base system to an open UE6 module. This means you’ll have the option to use a player’s entitled Fortnite Outfits in your own games, and you’ll get the tools to build Outfits for your own games that work inside Fortnite. We’re tackling this problem first because we want to prove things out with a system that’s complex enough to be a meaningful existence proof of the idea, and one that inherently comes with a ton of player value by respecting their purchases across an interconnected ecosystem of games.
We see this as the first step toward building a shared economy for smart assets: functional assets with logic and functionality that work across games, to recognize players’ time and spending in a better way. In the end, this isn't really a Fortnite story. It’s about proving that such a mature, complex system can work at scale—and that every game that works with these systems will immediately benefit from them.
Creativity and productivity multipliers with your preferred models
On the topic of model-assisted creation, we see it helping tighten iteration loops and reducing time-consuming manual setup of levels, character rigs, particle systems, skinning bone weights, as well as adjusting lighting, etc: all the manual work required to translate professional creative intent into interactive, performant, and cross-platform games. Crucially, Unreal Engine is uniquely placed to be the efficient, cross-platform, high-fidelity runtime that will remain the substrate on which much of the world’s best games run.Thus, 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. A big part of our effort is going into exposing a broad set of engine capabilities through the MCP protocol, so that developers can mix and match the best leading-edge models and build custom integrations of all sorts on an open Unreal Engine 6 MCP foundation. We are also improving the Epic Developer Assistant (EDA) as an optional turnkey solution, available to all by default.
Our goal for UE6 is to greatly reduce the tedious work in authoring content to leave more time for creative exploration, and increase the amount of iterations a team can make to polish their content. UE6 will ship with tools and workflows where you can choose to bring your own favorite models, battletested against internal development and in UEFN.
Also, internally at Epic, we’ve been doing a lot of investigation to see what works and what doesn’t for code generation. We recently opened up pretty broad usage for code generation and AI analysis across our backend, engine, and game development engineering teams.
We’ve had particular success with people writing custom tools for their own work, fast code indexing tools for helping LLMs deal with large codebases like Unreal Engine, fast incidence response analysis, automated root cause crash and CIS job failure analysis, automated test generation, and of course the acceleration and parallelization you’d expect on backend service development.
What’s interesting is that most of these use cases aren’t even generating mainline Unreal Engine code, though that will probably come eventually as well. You can expect Unreal Engine 6 to also include all of the key learnings for using codegen for engineering along with content workflows.
The path from here to there
UE6 converges two threads we've been running in parallel: UE5 for high-end stand-alone game and content development, and Unreal Editor for Fortnite as the live environment where the new programming model has been getting battle-tested.As UE5 and UEFN merge into one editor, you will be able to ship traditional games and projects exactly as you do today. You’ll be able to ship directly in Fortnite, or ship to your own ecosystem, and optionally, make it compatible with ours. You’ll have an easy path from one to another.
Our philosophy through this transition is to bring existing projects along, not to force a hard break. Studios shipping on UE5 today should expect a manageable, and clear path forward when UE6 is ready for them. To allow for this, Actors and Blueprints will be in early versions of UE6. Eventually, these will be deprecated when the new framework is sufficiently mature, and you’ll have conversion tools to move projects from one framework to the other.
We’re targeting a Unreal Engine 6 Early Access release at the end of 2027, with the full release of UE6 coming 12-18 months later. In the meantime, a new UE6 development stream is now on GitHub, publicly visible, just like the UE5 stream has always been. The Verse language implementation has moved out to be visible here, though it’s not intended for general adoption at this point.
Any remaining UE5 changes will merge to UE6 to not get lost, but not vice versa. In addition, Fortnite development will be attached to the UE6 stream so you can see all ongoing work live and cherry-pick changes as needed. However, this stream is not meant to be any kind of Alpha: it exists just to be transparent with where we’re going. And while we aren’t currently planning another official UE5 release after 5.8, we’re reserving the option to release a 5.9, if needed.
Building this together
UE6 is going to change a lot about how games are made. It will not change the thing that matters most, which is that the people in this industry—the game developers, the filmmakers, our Unreal Engine family—are the ones who make anything actually happen. Thank you for making Unreal Engine really shine.We’ll have a lot more to share on the road to Early Access, including deep dives on the new gameplay framework, Verse, Scene Graph, and model-assisted workflows we’re bringing into production tools. In the meantime, keep building on UE5 and UEFN. Everything you ship today is a step toward what we’re going to ship together in UE6.