After teasing it last month, Epic has announced that the next version of Unreal Engine will continue the company’s publicly derided efforts to shove AI-powered tools and features into more of its offerings.
On June 17, Epic posted a long message from engine development lead Marcus Wassmer about Unreal Engine 6, the next version of the company’s popular game development engine. Previous versions of it have powered games like Gears of War, Ark, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and, of course, Epic’s own Fortnite. With Unreal Engine 6, Epic is unifying Unreal Engine 5 and its Fortnite editor, which is powered by Unreal, into one singular, advanced engine that will also be filled to the brim with AI shit.
“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,” said Wassmer in his blog post on the Unreal website. “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 number 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.”
Epic recently teased that Rocket League will be updated to run on Unreal Engine 6, the first real confirmation from the company that the engine was coming. In today’s blog post, Wassmer confirmed a late 2027 release date for UE6.
Wassmer claims that internally at Epic, the company has been doing a lot of investigation into using AI to generate code and confirmed that recently, Epic “opened up pretty broad usage for code generation and AI analysis across our backend, engine, and game development engineering teams.” That sounds like Fortnite and possibly games like Rocket League are now using AI-generated code in some capacity.
Toward the end of the blog post, seemingly in a bid to assure people that Epic doesn’t want all of these AI tools to replace people and lead to further layoffs in the industry, Wassmer concludes by saying:
“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.”
Of course, it’s hard not to look at Unreal Engine 6 adding even more ways to streamline game development using tools that regularly hallucinate, steal, and get stuff wrong as anything other than a way to make teams more efficient, which in CEO speak means fewer people doing more work for about the same amount of money. I’m not convinced adding more genAI into Unreal Engine will do anything but lead to more layoffs. And the artists and devs who remain will get to spend hours of their day cleaning up AI’s mistakes, as seen in Epic’s recent Fortnite development video. The future sounds fast, messy, and terrible.