Epic Games’ Unreal Fest is taking place this week, and the company is using the gathering to announce a number of high-profile features coming to Unreal Engine 6 (UE6)—some of which could drastically change how games are made in the popular game creation tool.
Those changes include a shift from programming language C++ to Verse, new AI integration tools for popular models like Claude and Gemini, and a full-throated integration of Unreal Engine for Fortnite (UEFN).
Executive Vice President Marcus Wassmer shared these and other details in a blog post on the Unreal Engine Website. In it, he says the approach to UE6 is “shaping up quite differently” from how the company developed UE4 and UE5. “UE4 opened the engine up to everyone,” he wrote. “UE5 reinvented how we build worlds. UE6 is about evolving how we ship and operate them.”
Developers like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 developer Sandfall Interactive who rely on Unreal Engine 5’s Blueprints system should brace for major change. Epic says that Blueprints and the “Actors” system will eventually be deprecated once Unreal Engine 6’s framework is “sufficiently mature.” It promises that developers will have conversion tools to move projects from one framework to the next.
Scanning the blog post, there’s plenty to indicate that UEFN integration is at least partially motivated by a desire to make it easy for developers to ship games and then port elements of them over to Fortnite. The blog declares that “three things about game development need to change at the same time,” before spelling out how the move to Verse will allow for “increased accessibility of development,” and how AI-driven pipeline features will serve as “creativity and productivity multipliers so that teams can focus their efforts on the essential creative and technical tasks of development.”
But it’s the promise of “enabling content, code, and economies to become portable and interoperable across games, ecosystems, and engines through open standards” that may surprise developers the most. The goal, Wassmer says, is to “enable developer collaboration on much greater scales than ever before.”
Epic wants developers to build content that also works in Fortnite
To hear Wassmer tell it, the idea of custom code and content for different games and engines should be a thing of the past. “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,” he writes. This comes with a promise to make open-source standards like gITF and USD “first-class formats” within the engine.
Where open standards don’t exist, the company will “open up Unreal Engine’s own systems as open specifications with Verse APIs, defined asset conventions, and documentation that any engine, tool, or studio can implement against.”
These goals will sound familiar to anyone who has listened to Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney wax poetic over the years about software interoperability—but the company’s first proof-of-concept for this process will be in making Fortnite cosmetics. The blog says that Epic plans to move Epic’s Fortnite cosmetic base system to an open UE6 model, allowing developers to use players’ existing Fortnite outfits in their own games.
In turn, any outfits they create will work inside Fortnite. “We see this as the first step toward building a shared economy for smart assets: functional assets with logic and functionality that work across games, to recognize players’ time and spending in a better way,” Wassman writes.
The plan doesn’t end at cosmetics. Though Epic is promising that developers will be able to “ship traditional games and projects exactly as you do today,” developers will also have the ability to ship them inside of Fortnite alongside “their own ecosystems,” which can be made “compatible” with Epic’s. “You’ll have an easy path from one to another,” he says.
Developers eager to test these promises—or swerve away from them—will have the option to do so in late 2027, when UE6 Early Access releases. You can read the full details about UE6 in Wassmer’s post.