In an interview with Lex Fridman, Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney shared the first details about the next version of Unreal Engine, Unreal Engine 6. According to Sweeney, UE6 is a few years away, but we might see preview versions of it in 2 or 3 years.
Epic Games is currently working on two different aspects of UE5. Right now, there is Unreal Engine 5 for developers and Unreal Engine 5 for Fortnite creators. As such, there is different bits of development that are only in one area of it, and they are not applied to both. For instance, not all of the UE5 features are available in Fortnite because Epic hasn’t figured out or hasn’t gotten to the point where they can deploy them to all seven platforms in an independent way.
As Sweeney claimed, the place where all these different threads of development come together is Unreal Engine 6. In short, the aim for Unreal Engine 6 is to bring the best of both worlds together. It will offer much easier gameplay programming for both the Fortnite community and developers. Sweeney also stated that UE6 will offer more scalability to large scale simulations of all sorts. Plus, it will offer greater ease of use. This means that studios will be able to hire programmers who are familiar with and experienced with the engine.
Moreover, UE6 will offer devs the full development capabilities. Thus, they will be able to build their game once and ship it anywhere. Moreover, standalone games will be able to access and use all the items in Fortnite. Similarly, UE6 assets from standalone games will be compatible with Fortnite (so that you can import and use them there).
From what Sweeney says, it appears that Unreal Engine 6 will be more of an evolution of UE5, and not a complete overhaul. Or at least that’s the vibe I got from it. Yes, UE6 will ultimately look better than UE5 games. However, the gap between them may not be as big as the one we saw between UE3 and UE4 or UE4 and UE5.
As said, Unreal Engine 6 is a few years away. So, we won’t really see any games using it for a while. Still, this interview may give you an idea of Epic’s current tech direction.
Enjoy and stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
Contact: Email