Epic reveals first Unreal Engine 6 game, and it’s not Fortnite

As reported by TheGamer, Epic Games has announced Unreal Engine 6, the next iteration of its ubiquitous videogame and CGI middleware. The announcement came during the Paris Major of the Rocket League Championship Series.

DiscussingFilm shared a brief clip of the announcement on X, “The Everything App.” It shows some snippets of shinier cars and cinematic angles of in-engine gameplay. The trailer declares a “new era” and “new engine” for the venerable vehicular sci-fi soccer sim, before revealing a first look at the Unreal Engine 6 logo.

It’s been four years since the release of Unreal Engine 5, and 12 since Unreal Engine 4 first hit the scene. Rocket League itself is still running on the truly ancient Unreal Engine 3, the tech that powered much of the Xbox 360 generation. An upgrade of this magnitude strikes me as a sequel-level shift, but Epic has never been one to opt for an Overwatch or Destiny-style standalone sequel to its live service games.

Fortnite, for example, got its own upgrade from Unreal Engine 4 to 5 with no disruption to its massive digital economy. In fact, it’s a little bit surprising to me that Epic’s marquee game wasn’t the vehicle for an Unreal 6 announcement—though it’s obviously in much less need of an upgrade than Rocket League.

An announcement like this is seismic for the games industry: Unreal is one of the (if not the) most widely used middleware game engines. Major studios with a history of proprietary tech like CD Projekt have switched to Unreal in recent years. It’s also a popular option for indie devs as an alternative to Unity, and even has a prominent place in the film industry, used by the likes of Disney for producing CG visuals.

The Unreal Engine 5 era has been a mixed bag: Epic has achieved new heights of adoption and ubiquity, and the engine itself has proven capable of supporting gorgeous unions of art direction and photorealism like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Avowed.

But Unreal 5 also has a well-earned reputation for poor performance and optimization, particularly on PC. Epic’s own Fortnite runs like butter in Unreal 5, but whether other games’ performance woes are the fault of Epic’s tools or its customers’ use of them, the end result is still the same. A number of comments under DiscussingFilm’s X post share a similar theme: “Fix Unreal 5 first.”

This Rocket League vehicle for Unreal Engine 6’s reveal strikes me as being more subdued than the bombastic reveal of Unreal 5 at the 2021 Game Awards: A still-shockingly realistic and faithful homage to the beginning of the Matrix that was accompanied by a free open world demo on consoles. That felt like a brash statement of intent. This feels like more of a conservative teaser.

Time will tell if Unreal 6 will embody Epic’s metaverse aspirations, but a shot in the trailer showing other Epic games like Lego and Normal Fortnite in a line-up with Rocket League certainly seems to hint at this ambition. In 2024, Tim Sweeney described Fortnite’s growing status as a platform for independent developers and multiple interoperable games as a model for what the company hoped to achieve on a larger scale with Unreal Engine 6.