It should come as no surprise that, while Unreal Engine 5 is an incredibly popular game engine, Epic Games has been working on its successor, Unreal Engine 6, behind the scenes. In a recent interview with Lex Fridman, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has revealed the first real bits of information about the next-generation engine.
In the interview, Sweeney spoke about how Epic Games is working on quite a few things simultaneously. Unreal Engine 5 itself, for instance, currently has split into two versions: Unreal Engine 5, and Unreal Editor for Fortnite.
“The idea is that the shipping version gains more and more features over time, but maintaining backwards compatibility with old versions and continuing to improve and approach the ultimate version of it as we go,” said Sweeney. “And we’ve been doing this experiment entirely within the world of Unreal Editor for Fortnite for now. We want to test this and iterate with Fortnite creators in just the metaverse usage case before we make it available to all of our partners using Unreal Engine for all of their projects.”
Sweeney describes Unreal Engine 6 as being the nexus point for all of Epic Games’ work on developing the two different forks of Unreal Engine 5. According to him, all of the features from the main Unreal Engine, including the use of C++ as its main programming language of choice, as well as all of the new features coming to the engine through Unreal Editor for Fortnite, will ultimately come together in Unreal Engine 6.
“And so the place where all these different threads of development come together is Unreal Engine 6,” he said. “It’s a few years away, we don’t have an exact time frame, but we could be seeing preview versions of it perhaps 2 to 3 years from now. And we’re making continuous progress towards it.”
“The aim for UE6 is to bring the best of both worlds together,” he continued. “Much easier gameplay programming for the Fortnite community and for licensees, but more scalability to large-scale simulations of all sorts, greater use of use, meaning it will be easier to hire programmers who are familiar with and experienced with the thing. But also ensure that every game developer has the full deployment capabilities. So they can build a game once and then ship it anywhere.”
“The ultimate version of this enables a game developer to build a game of any sort, and ship it to both Fortnite as a Fortnite Island that players can go into… or ship as a standalone game, or both. If they ship as a standalone game, they shouldn’t be missing out on the open economy either because in this time frame, we’ll have opened up the Fortnite item economy to third-party developers of all sorts.”
Ultimately, this likely means that Unreal Engine 6, when it is released, will act as more of a refinement over its predecessor rather than being a whole new engine altogether with game-changing new features. In contrast, with Unreal Engine 5, Epic Games had emphasised the engine’s new capabilities when it comes to visual fidelity with technologies like Lumen and Nanite. Unreal Engine 4 in the past was also a big step forward from its predecessor, making multiplatform game development even easier with a host of (at the time) new features.
Considering the success of Fortnite, we will likely see the first signs of Unreal Engine 6 through the popular free-to-play game.
