After a brief tease showing Rocket League running using the engine, we now have a more official reveal of Unreal Engine 6. Capturing the AI-centric zeitgeist, the new iteration of Epic Games' Unreal Engine will be integrated with AI at a core level, as the company hopes to remove a lot of the "tedious work" we see with games.
"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...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. UE6 will ship with tools and workflows where you can choose to bring your own favourite models, battletested against internal development and in UEFN," Epic explains in a post announcing Unreal Engine 6.
For anyone concerned that having AI models and LLMs integrated into the core of Unreal Engine 6 is going to take away the human touch in gaming, Epic writes that while this new Unreal Engine will change a lot about game creation, it won't change who makes our games. "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," Epic writes.
For now, there's still a lot of work to do over on Epic's side. There are no plans to release Unreal Engine 6 until late 2027, when it'll be put out in Early Access. From there, it's got another 12-18 months of work before it'll get a wider release. A lot can change between now and then.