Epic has detailed Unreal Engine 6, which it says will prominently integrate generative AI models to allow developers to “build content faster” while “maintaining the creative control you need”.
Unreal Engine 6 was first announced alongside a glimpse of the next-gen Rocket League game last month. At the State of Unreal event in Chicago held on Wednesday, Epic shared more details on its plans for the middleware.
According to Epic, UE6 is about “evolving” how developers ship and operate games, more so than how they build 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,” it 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.”
Unreal Engine 6’s three big features are its shift to the gameplay programming model Verse, its move to make content and code portable and interoperable across games, and its integration of AI models, according to Epic.
According to Epoc, UE6 will introduce integrations with AI models such as Claude, Gemini, and others, which will act as “creativity and productivity multipliers,” enabling teams to “focus their efforts on the essential creative and technical tasks of development rather than time on time-consuming manual tasks”.
During State of Unreal, the Fortnite maker provided examples of such tasks developers may wish to use AI to speed up, including “setup of levels, character rigs, particle systems, skinning bone weights, as well as adjusting lighting”.
“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,” it said. “UE6 will ship with tools and workflows where you can choose to bring your own favorite models, battletested against internal development and in UEFN.”
During an on-stage presentation, Epic showed how AI large language models (LLMs) can be used directly with Unreal Engine to generate content. During the demonstration, it used a Claude prompt window to furnish a virtual apartment by asking for items, which were then pulled from the assets library.
It later showed how it could change the lighting in a city scene by asking Claude to alter the time of day, or even use a static photo as a reference. Epic stressed that developers will have final control over their creations and can manually change their results.
Unreal Engine 6 will enter early access at the end of 2027 “-ish”, Epic said, with a full release planned for around 12-18 months later.
“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.”
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