While Unreal Engine 5 has been on the market for just over four years, Epic Games is already working on Unreal Engine 6. As confirmed today, the first game to be ported over will presumably be Rocket League, with other in-house titles soon to follow.
As announced during today’s Rocket League Championship Series (RLCS), Unreal Engine 6 is officially on the way, with Rocket League itself apparently to be the first game to be ported to it. Not much else was shown or revealed by Epic Games, aside from a few quick clips showing improved graphics, reflections, and lighting—though not by a degree that stands out from top-shelf UE5 titles.
This’ll make Unreal Engine 5’s market presence strikingly brief, especially compared to Unreal Engine 4, which dominated the industry for around eight years before being replaced by its successor. Unreal Engine 3 also spent the same amount of time as the go-to Epic Games engine solution, or twice as long as UE5’s apparent lifespan.
It is unclear why Epic Games would switch to a new engine entirely instead of focusing on polishing the current one as much as possible. It already has impeccable graphical fidelity and lighting, probably the best in the industry even, though optimization remains a big issue that many developers have to solve themselves (and often fail).
Therefore, I really hope Epic Games prioritizes a strong optimization pipeline and makes it easier for developers to take care of that side of things efficiently, since most games made in UE5 nowadays achieve the good looks but simply do not run well even on beefy hardware.
I’m still of the opinion Epic should’ve just continued work on UE5. But time will tell if this was the right decision.
