Epic Games outlines its vision for Unreal Engine 6

• Unreal Engine 6 is in development with early access release targeted for the end of 2027.
• Epic plans to expand the use of Verse programming language.
• The new engine will have a focus on interoperability, live-service development and AI-assisted workflows.

Epic Games has shared new details on its upcoming Unreal Engine 6 following its recent State of Unreal presentation. 

Unreal Engine 6 was first teased during last month’s Rocket League Championship Series, and Epic has now confirmed that the engine is in development and is targeting an early access release at the end of 2027. 

According to Epic, Unreal Engine 6 will combine the triple-A game development capabilities built in Unreal Engine 5 with a next-generation development pipeline that has been developed through Fortnite. 

The company said the goal is to enable developers to create games and deploy them across traditional platforms, Fortnite, and their own live or multi-product ecosystems.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said the company is taking a different approach to previous engine generations.

"In prior generations we've put graphics first in leading and announcing our technology, but with the Unreal Engine 6 generation we are focusing on the foundations of the engine to prepare for the next generation of game development and gaming." 

Major initiatives  

Epic also outlined three of the major initiatives that are set to be the core of Unreal Engine 6. The first is to expand the use of its programming language, Verse, to support large-scale and persistent experiences. 

The second focus is on making content, code and economies more portable and interoperable across games ecosystems and engines to give developers greater scale. 

The final initiative centres on development tools, with Epic planning to introduce features such as a Model Context Protocol with integrations for AI models including Claude and Gemini. These tools are intended to help automate time-consuming tasks and will improve productivity for development teams. 

Epic also said it will continue to improve on core engine functionality in areas such as rendering, development iteration times, team workflows, and mobile hardware support and optimisation. 

While the wait for Unreal Engine 6 begins, Epic did confirm that Unreal Engine 5.8 is now available and brings a host of updates and improvements.