Clearest look at Unreal Engine 6

Hi everyone 👋

Huge Unreal news that went under the radar. Epic Game’s CEO and Founder, Tim Sweeney, revealed his vision for what Unreal Engine 6 might look like!

Recently Mathew Ball, the leading journalist and investor for Metaverse projects, interviewed Tim Sweeney and Neal Stephenson, author of Snowcrash and first person to coin the term “Metaverse”, on what they think the future is for the Metaverse and entertainment. In it Tim Sweeney revealed a clear vision for what he wants Unreal Engine 6 to be.

I recommend to read the full interview on his website here. In this newsletter I will give my thoughts on Tim Sweeney’s vision and highlight his key points about Unreal Engine 6. There will also be a ton of wild speculation on my part so do not take any of my guesses as fact.

Firstly, it appears from Sweeney’s interview that Unreal Engine 6 is still just an idea and is not actively being developed at this point. While everything Epic develops will contribute to Unreal Engine 6, including advancements in Unreal’s own Verse programming language, its release is not expected in the near future. My guess is that UE6 will be released between 2028 and 2030, which would make UE5’s lifespan similar to UE4’s. A key feature of UE6 would be the introduction of Verse to Unreal Engine as a new way to program in the engine. This means we do not expect Verse to be in Unreal for the next 4 to 6 years. Us developers will still be programming with C++ and Blueprints for a while!

Unreal Engine 6’s main feature will be connectivity and massive multiplayer worlds. It will push the limits of how many players can exist in a single consistent world.

“So one of the big efforts that we're making for Unreal Engine 6 is improving the networking model, where we both have servers supporting lots of players, but also the ability to seamlessly move players between servers and to enable all the servers in a data center or in multiple data centers, to talk to each other and coordinate a simulation of the scale of millions or in the future, perhaps even a billion concurrent players.”

- Tim Sweeney

Sweeney hinted at Fortnite becoming a single massive environment, with each player’s island or game becoming a location in this world. Instead of hopping into the lobby menu to switch games, players could see their character physically move to where that game is located. Of course the gameplay and world properties would change in the local environment of an island.

This immediately reminded me of the opening scene of Ready Player One, which introduces that movie and book’s version of the Metaverse. It has become the go-to visualization for people trying to explain what the Metaverse is.

To create such a system, the way networking is handled will fundamentally change in UE6. Part of the reason Epic created Verse was to make programming networked functionality easier. Currently, if we want to create a multiplayer game, we generally have to write the code twice: once for the server side and again for the client side. This makes multiplayer development significantly more complicated than singleplayer.

Since multiplayer is core to Epic’s Metaverse, the new networking system will be structured so that Verse code only has to be written once and it works for both the client and the server. The engine will do a lot of the hard networking for you and scale your program automatically, allowing you to focus on developing what is important. This Verse code will also be modular and interoperable, allowing other developers to reuse it for their games and experiences.

Interopability and open standards will be core to Unreal Engine 6. Tim Sweeney wants to extend this idea of Fortnite games existing in the same universe to other games and creator ecosystems. This likely means that when we create a game in Unreal Engine 6, we will have the option to compile the game as an executable for PC or consoles as we do now, or we can deploy it directly to Epic’s Metaverse. Sweeney has talked about UEFN being merged into UE6 and Fortnite transitioning to a Metaverse. The benefit of deploying to "Fortnite" is that we can leverage the preexisting player base and skins that players already own.

A skins ability to be shared isn’t just limited to the Fortnite ecosystem or games deployed in its Metaverse. Other Metaverses built on different game engines like Unity or Godot could use Fortnite’s skins or vice versa if they all agree to a form of revenue sharing and open standards. While this may sound like something NFT proponents have been saying, Sweeney has repeatedly made it clear that there are no plans for NFTs or cryptocurrency to be integrated.

Epic Games would have to negotiate and reach an agreement with the other Metaverse corporations to make this happen; any company could participate. I am very curious to see exactly how this would work. Companies are notoriously litigious, and Epic has likely negotiated complex IP contracts to create skins for famous characters like Batman or Spider-Man.

If the Metaverse is agreeing on open standards for environments, then it can agree on standards for avatars. It may be that each player can create their own avatar or use a premade avatar. An open Metaverse probably could not lock the look/identity of its users behind a paywall. This open avatar system already exists in VR Chat. Players have complete freedom to create their own avatar in Unity or grab an already existing avatar. But if anyone could pull off a Metaverse economy based off of selling skins, it would be Epic Games since they have already had massive success with Fortnite.

Obviously, Unreal Engine 6 will have more features than just multiplayer improvements when it is released. We could see incredible, unpredictable technology like what we saw with UE5’s Lumen and Nanite. However, this is the main vision for Unreal Engine 6 at this time. Epic plans on building up to this goal over the coming years. Whenever Epic announces a new Unreal or Fortnite update, keep in mind that the end goal will be the Unreal Engine 6 Metaverse.

See you next time,

Zach Hunter

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