Epic Games Unveils First Look at Unreal Engine 6

In a blog post, Epic Games provided a first look at Unreal Engine 6, which is described as Unreal Engine 5 and Unreal Engine For Fortnite combined into a single, unified engine for the next generation of gaming. "UE6 will include an entirely new gameplay framework known collectively as Scene Graph, built from scratch on Verse," said Marcus Wassmer, development lead at Epic. "Verse is the foundation for Epic's future programming model. It's a next-generation programming language purpose-built to power massive, persistent game worlds at scale, where global state just works, and transactionally correct concurrency is handled by the runtime. Scene Graph is a modern, high-level gameplay framework that will give you a true foundation for creating games and experiences easily, and sharing their interoperable components between games. Verse draws ideas from functional, logic, and imperative languages, and should feel immediately familiar to anyone who has worked with languages like Python or C#. But it also has some unique features, aimed at solving the complexity and scaling problems of modern game development-starting with its unique software transactional memory model... Content and code should be portable across games and engines. Our goal is to give the games industry a whole new way to grow our ecosystems with cross-promotion, portable player value, and to really lean into all of the positive-sum dynamics that Metcalfe's Law predicts for connecting experiences and social graphs together... On the topic of model-assisted creation, we see it helping tighten iteration loops and reducing time-consuming manual setup of levels, character rigs, particle systems, skinning bone weights, as well as adjusting lighting, etc: all the manual work required to translate professional creative intent into interactive, performant, and cross-platform games. Crucially, Unreal Engine is uniquely placed to be the efficient, cross-platform, high-fidelity runtime that will remain the substrate on which much of the world's best games run. Thus, 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. 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... We'll have a lot more to share on the road to Early Access, including deep dives on the new gameplay framework, Verse, Scene Graph, and model-assisted workflows we're bringing into production tools. In the meantime, keep building on UE5 and UEFN. Everything you ship today is a step toward what we're going to ship together in UE6." Investors in Epic Games include Tencent (TCEHY), KKR (KKR), Disney (DIS), and Sony (SONY).