Unreal Engine 5 is now the biggest single engine in terms of games sold, and many studios adopting it in place of proprietary engines (see our guide to the best game development software). That doesn't mean it doesn't have its weaknesses, though, and devs are understandably wondering what's next for Epic Games' real-time tool.
We've looked before at Epic's blueprint for Unreal Engine 5.6 and beyond. But CEO Tim Sweeney has now offered the first real nuggets of information about the next big iteration, Unreal Engine 6 (UE 6). And devs aren't entirely sold.
What's coming in Unreal Engine 6?
In an interview with Lex Fridman (see video above), Tim says that Unreal Engine 6 will unify Unreal Engine 5 with Unreal Editor for Fortnite, which are currently developed as separate entities.
Tim said: “The aim for UE 6 is to bring the best of both worlds together. 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 idea is for the shipping version to gain more and more features over time, but maintaining backwards compatibility. While Unreal Engine 6 demos are at least two years away, Tim said the company was already making progress.
"And we’ve been doing this experiment entirely within the world of Unreal Editor for Fortnite for now," he said. "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.”
He continued: “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.”
CPU multi-threading in Unreal Engine 6
Epic also intends to “address a number of the core limitations” with the current engine, including its single-threaded simulation, which is limiting for many games. Instead, Unreal Engine 6 will have multi-threaded architecture, allowing games to get more from CPUs with lots of cores. This would hopefully resolve some of the CPU issues seen with Unreal Engine 5 games.
Tim said that previously Epic "didn’t want to burden either ourselves, our partners, or the community with the complications of multi-threading" but that it recognised this has become "an increasing limitation".
Will Unreal Engine 6 be an iterative release?
It generally sounds like Unreal Engine 6 will be a refinement rather than a revolution with game-changing features like UE 5 was. That could make sense given that many games still don't make use of all the features in UE 5, which saw the introduction of technologies like Lumen and Nanite.
But developers are divided over the news. "This is why I left UE as a developer: too much focus on Fortnite," one person wrote in the comments on YouTube. "Nobody wants Fortnite to be the focus of UE but keep pushing those V-bucks Sweeney."
Others think Epic should concentrate on optimising Unreal Engine 5. "Maybe they should make UE 5 useable/good before they worry about UE 6 instead of relying on artificial AI slop," one person wrote. "The ultimate Unreal Engine for me will be when the game code is so robust and user friendly that I no longer have 75 per cent of my games dealing with traversal stutter," was another comment.
"UE 6 needs fleshed out ECS-like system," another person suggested. "It will simply be too slow for future games if it does not have this. The data-flow UE uses is the real bottleneck of the engine." Others want Epic to find a way to allow third-party optimisations in its main branch.
Some defend Epic's approach, however, pinning some of the blame for performance issues on developers. "UE's source code can be modified in any way possible as devs see fit. [The fact] they aren't doing that and are relying on the engine as is is what's causing all these issues."
For more UE news, see Nvidia's Unreal Engine 5 RTX neural rendering demo and Epic's guide to switching to Unreal from Unity.
