Epic Games integrates Claude and Gemini AI into Unreal Engine 6 amid industry skepticism

Epic Games details how it's embracing generative AI in Unreal Engine - Engadget

Just over half of game developers think gen AI is bad for the industry, according to a report published earlier this year. During The State of Unreal keynote at Unreal Fest on Wednesday, Epic Games revealed just how it's embracing generative AI in Unreal Engine (UE). Along with offering the first details on Unreal Engine 6 (UE6), the company discussed new features for Unreal Engine 5.8, which it also released on Wednesday. As part of the latest update, Epic is offering an experimental Model Context Protocol (MCP) plugin that will allow developers to hook gen AI models such as Claude and Gemini into Unreal Engine. It's looking to make the MCP an integral part of UE6. Marcus Wassmer, the head of Epic's development team, wrote in a blog post that the gen AI models can act as "creativity and productivity multipliers so that teams can focus their efforts on the essential creative and technical tasks of development rather than time on time-consuming manual tasks." The blog post went on to state that, "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 favorite models, battletested against internal development and in UEFN [Unreal Engine for Fortnite]." Epic gave a demonstration of Claude Code connecting to UE, then pulling objects from an asset library and placing them in a virtual living room. Developers can still move the objects around manually in the UE editor. The company also showed how a developer might use Claude Code in UE to build a city that can be automatically adjusted as assets like parks are added. Along with modifying assets, gen AI models can adjust factors like lighting and match atmospheric conditions to real-world examples. In a video showing off Unreal Engine 5.8, Epic suggested that developers could use the likes of Claude to "automate asset creation, testing and optimization. The plugin can access core UE systems such as blueprints, assets, levels, materials, meshes and many more." It shouldn't be too much of a surprise that Epic is going all in on gen AI in UE6. Back in November, CEO Tim Sweeney suggested that a "made with AI" tag may be "relevant to art exhibits for authorship disclosure, and to digital content licensing marketplaces where buyers need to understand the rights situation. It makes no sense for game stores, where AI will be involved in nearly all future production." In January, the Game Developers Conference published its 2026 State of the Game Industry report, which was based on a survey of more than 2,300 game industry workers. Of those, 36 percent said they were using gen AI tools as part of their job. Most of those using such tools were doing so for research and brainstorming (81 percent) but also for tasks like prototyping (35 percent). However, 52 percent of respondents said they thought gen AI was bad for the industry. That figure was up from 30 percent in the 2025 edition of the survey and 18 percent in 2024. Only seven percent said it was having a positive impact. Elsewhere at Unreal Fest, it emerged that Epic is merging Unreal Engine 5 and UEFN into a single platform in UE6. One other thing that the company is testing is the ability to pull Fortnite skins into other UE6 games, and to let developers move their skins in the other direction. The company aims to release UE6 in early access in late 2027, with a full release lined up for around 12-18 months later. Epic had some news to share about collaborations as well. Those creating Fortnite experiences using UEFN will soon be able to make games based on The Simpsons, just as they can currently do with Star Wars IP. The company also revealed that more than 30 gaming collaborations are lined up for Fortnite this year, including Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, Vampire Survivors, Control Resonant and Phantom Blade Zero. However, Vampire Survivors developer Poncle appears to have concerns about Epic's embrace of gen AI. "Following today's news about gen AI usage by Epic to create all sort [sic] of game assets, including Fortnite characters, we're currently 'reviewing' our collaboration with Fortnite," Poncle stated on Reddit. "We'll let you know if anything moves forward."

Unreal Engine 6 AI: Epic builds in Claude and Gemini

The next Unreal Engine will let studios plug in Claude, Gemini or any model they like to do the 'tedious work' of building games. More than half of developers think that is a bad idea. Epic will let studios plug Claude, Gemini, or any model they like into the next Unreal Engine to do the 'tedious work' of building games. More than half of developers think that is a bad idea. Epic Games has laid out its plans for Unreal Engine 6, and generative AI sits right at the centre of them. At its State of Unreal keynote at Unreal Fest in Chicago on Wednesday, the Fortnite maker said UE6 will fold in integrations for models such as Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini, pitching them as 'creativity and productivity multipliers' for game studios. The idea is to hand the grunt work of game-making to a model, so teams can spend more time on creative decisions. It is the same logic that took Claude into design tools at Canva, now pointed at the software that builds games. What Epic is actually shipping UE6 rests on three pillars, according to Marcus Wassmer, the executive who leads Epic's development team. The first is a new gameplay programming model called Verse, a language Epic says should feel familiar to anyone who has used Python or C#. The second is making game content and code portable across different games and engines through open standards. The third is AI. Epic is exposing the engine through a Model Context Protocol (MCP) layer, the open standard that lets large language models connect to other software. That means studios can mix and match models rather than being locked into one. "UE6 will ship with tools and workflows where you can choose to bring your own favorite models," Wassmer wrote. A first version is already here. Unreal Engine 5.8, released on the same day, ships an experimental MCP plugin that connects any LLM to core engine systems, including blueprints, assets, levels, materials, and meshes. In a demo, Epic showed Claude Code pulling objects from an asset library to furnish a virtual apartment, then adjusting the lighting in a city scene to match a real-world reference photo. Developers can still move everything by hand afterwards. The real shift is who the engine depends on The obvious story is that AI has arrived in Unreal Engine. The more important one is that Epic is turning third-party models into a standing part of how games get made, inside the toolset a large slice of the industry runs on, from Fortnite to countless studios that license the engine. UE6 itself is a way off. Epic is targeting an early access release at the end of 2027, with a full launch 12 to 18 months after that. The new engine also unifies Epic's two development streams, the standalone UE5 and Unreal Editor for Fortnite, into a single product. One early proof point: Epic plans to let players carry their Fortnite outfits into other games built on UE6, and let developers build skins that work inside Fortnite. Half of developers think this is a mistake Epic is pushing AI into its engine at a moment when much of the industry is wary of it. In the Game Developers Conference's 2026 State of the Game Industry survey of more than 2,300 workers, 52 per cent said they thought generative AI was having a negative effect on the industry. That is up from 30 per cent in 2025 and 18 per cent in 2024. Just 7 per cent saw a positive impact. The unease is already showing. Poncle, the studio behind Vampire Survivors, said it was 'reviewing' its Fortnite collaboration following the gen-AI news. Epic, meanwhile, is cutting costs. It laid off more than 1,000 staff in March, as Fortnite engagement has softened against rivals like Roblox. Chief executive Tim Sweeney has made his stance clear. Last November he argued that a 'made with AI' tag "makes no sense for game stores, where AI will be involved in nearly all future production." With UE6, Epic is building that assumption directly into the tools. Whether the studios that depend on Unreal follow it there is the open question.

Unreal Engine's big new idea is letting gen-AI LLMs plug directly into it and talk to it

Epic Games has revealed a new tool for Unreal Engine 5.8 which allows generative AI large language models (LLMs) to plug into and communicate with the engine directly, using its tools while being directed by text prompts. This tool, called the Unreal MCP plugin, was revealed during the State of Unreal broadcast today, presented by senior director of Epic Games' Research & Development department, Michael Lentine. It is available to use right now by Unreal Engine developers. The first example we saw showed Unreal Engine running on one half of the screen with a Claude chat box on the right of the screen. A user then gave Claude instructions, allowing the LLM to generate and alter furniture in an empty room.. But Lentine was keen to stress during the presentation that you, the developer, will be in control. "Models are good at broad iterations," Lentine said, "You're good at knowing exactly what you want.". The presentation then moved to show the creation of a cityscape, built with a combination of manual work and AI generation. In a later example, which showed lighting being decided upon for this city, the user asked the LLM to make "overcast" skies. The model got this wrong, which was highlighted by Lentine. The presentation then showed the user's ability to correct this manually using the LLM chat box. Finally, the presentation showed a smaller scene where a hazard would occur as a player gets close in a city street environment. Lentine describes this as a scene that would "normally mean days of back-and-forth between multiple disciplines", before showing how this new tool could rectify the issue relatively quickly. "What we've shown here today would take months to build by hand, but with the MCP server and Unreal, our artists were able to make all of this in days," Lentine said. "When you lower the technical friction, you can iterate more and make better games." While this is a presentation, and not necessarily reflective of how the tool will actually work in the hands of developers, it does appear to be a method of blurring the lines between AI-generation in game development and hand-built projects. This reveal comes at a time where the lines are already plenty blurred. While pushback against generative AI use in game development remains fierce, many developers continue to use it to aid in development of modern titles. Only recently, Sega had to address the tech's use in the upcoming Crazy Taxi World Tour, describing it as a "support tool for developers".

Epic unveils Unreal Engine 6 with built-in generative AI integration

Just over half of game developers believe generative AI is detrimental to the industry, according to a report published earlier this year. During The State of Unreal keynote at Unreal Fest, Epic Games detailed its approach to generative AI in Unreal Engine (UE) and announced the release of Unreal Engine 5.8, which includes an experimental Model Context Protocol (MCP) plugin. This plugin will enable developers to integrate generative AI models such as Claude and Gemini into Unreal Engine and is expected to be a core component of Unreal Engine 6 (UE6). Marcus Wassmer, head of Epic's development team, stated that generative AI models can enhance creativity and productivity by reducing time spent on manual tasks. He mentioned in a blog post, "our goal for UE6 is to greatly reduce the tedious work in authoring content to leave more time for creative exploration." UE6 will allow developers to choose and implement their preferred models tested against internal development and Unreal Engine for Fortnite (UEFN). Epic demonstrated the integration of Claude Code with Unreal Engine during the keynote. This functionality allows the pulling of objects from an asset library into a virtual environment, while developers can still adjust object placements manually within the UE editor. A demonstration showcased how a developer might use Claude Code to build a city that adapts as new assets, such as parks, are added. The system can also adjust lighting and atmospheric conditions based on real-world examples. The MCP plugin is designed to automate asset creation, testing, and optimization by accessing core Unreal Engine systems such as blueprints, assets, levels, materials, and meshes. Tim Sweeney, Epic's CEO, indicated that a "made with AI" tag could become relevant for art exhibits and digital content licensing in future game productions. According to the Game Developers Conference's 2026 State of the Game Industry report, 36% of over 2,300 surveyed game industry workers reported using generative AI tools at work, with 52% expressing that it has a negative impact on the industry. This figure has increased from 30% in the 2025 report and 18% in 2024, while only 7% reported a positive effect. At Unreal Fest, Epic announced plans to merge Unreal Engine 5 and UEFN into a single platform in UE6. It is also testing the capability to transfer Fortnite skins to other UE6 games and vice versa. UE6 is slated for early access in late 2027, with a full release expected 12 to 18 months later. Epic also confirmed several upcoming collaborations, including the ability to create Fortnite experiences based on The Simpsons and over 30 gaming collaborations planned for the year, such as Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds and Vampire Survivors. However, Poncle, the developer of Vampire Survivors, expressed concerns regarding Epic's use of generative AI for asset creation, stating that they are currently reviewing their collaboration with Fortnite.

Epic Games pulls back the curtain on Unreal Engine 6, revealing exactly what everyone expected

Epic Games has recently wrapped up its State of Unreal 2026 livestream, where it pulled back the curtain on the upcoming Unreal Engine 6. Unreal Engine 6 was first teased during a recent Rocket League Champion Series, and in that announcement, Epic Games stated that Rocket League would be the first title to adopt the new version of Unreal Engine, which is quite a considerable jump, as Rocket League was built on Unreal Engine 3. Epic explained that it plans to merge Unreal Engine 5 and the Fortnite Unreal Editor to create Unreal Engine 6, and that this update will include integrating popular AI models, such as Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini. "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 favorite models, battle-tested against internal development and in UEFN," said Epic Games in a statement to VideoGamesChronicle The idea behind integrating these AI models is to multiply developers' creativity, as Epic believes teams will now be able to "focus their efforts on the essential creative and technical tasks of development rather than time on time-consuming manual tasks". Epic even went on to provide examples of how developers can increase their output by offloading trivial tasks to AI models, stating that AI models can handle "setup of levels, character rigs, particle systems, skinning bone weights, as well as adjusting lighting". Unreal Engine 6 debuting with AI integration isn't surprising at all, and in fact, I would have been more shocked if Epic Games didn't include support for AI models, especially considering the explosion in popularity of specific AI models such as Anthropic's Claude Code.

The Next Version Of Unreal Engine Is Going To Be Filled With GenAI Tools

After teasing it last month, Epic has announced that the next version of Unreal Engine will continue the company's publicly derided efforts to shove AI-powered tools and features into more of its offerings. On June 17, Epic posted a long message from engine development lead Marcus Wassmer about Unreal Engine 6, the next version of the company's popular game development engine. Previous versions of it have powered games like Gears of War, Ark, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and, of course, Epic's own Fortnite. With Unreal Engine 6, Epic is unifying Unreal Engine 5 and its Fortnite editor, which is powered by Unreal, into one singular, advanced engine that will also be filled to the brim with AI shit. "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," said Wassmer in his blog post on the Unreal website. "A big part of our effort is going into exposing a broad set of engine capabilities through the MCP protocol, so that developers can mix and match the best leading-edge models and build custom integrations of all sorts on an open Unreal Engine 6 MCP foundation. We are also improving the Epic Developer Assistant (EDA) as an optional turnkey solution, available to all by default." "Our goal for UE6 is to greatly reduce the tedious work in authoring content to leave more time for creative exploration, and increase the number 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 favorite models, battletested against internal development and in UEFN." Epic recently teased that Rocket League will be updated to run on Unreal Engine 6, the first real confirmation from the company that the engine was coming. In today's blog post, Wassmer confirmed a late 2027 release date for UE6. Wassmer claims that internally at Epic, the company has been doing a lot of investigation into using AI to generate code and confirmed that recently, Epic "opened up pretty broad usage for code generation and AI analysis across our backend, engine, and game development engineering teams." That sounds like Fortnite and possibly games like Rocket League are now using AI-generated code in some capacity. Toward the end of the blog post, seemingly in a bid to assure people that Epic doesn't want all of these AI tools to replace people and lead to further layoffs in the industry, Wassmer concludes by saying: "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." Of course, it's hard not to look at Unreal Engine 6 adding even more ways to streamline game development using tools that regularly hallucinate, steal, and get stuff wrong as anything other than a way to make teams more efficient, which in CEO speak means fewer people doing more work for about the same amount of money. I'm not convinced adding more genAI into Unreal Engine will do anything but lead to more layoffs. And the artists and devs who remain will get to spend hours of their day cleaning up AI's mistakes, as seen in Epic's recent Fortnite development video. The future sounds fast, messy, and terrible.

Unreal Engine 6 Comes With Claude, Gemini Models to Speed Up Game Development

Epic Games detailed the next iteration of its Unreal Engine and confirmed a major update for Unreal Engine 5 at the Unreal Fest conference on Wednesday. The Fortnite maker said that Unreal Engine 6, which was teased at Rocket League Championship Series last month, would integrate popular generative AI models like Claude and Gemini to help developers build game content faster and reduce "tedious work." The announcements came at the State of the Unreal keynote at Unreal Fest on Wednesday, where Epic formally unveiled Unreal Engine 6, detailing its key features and. The company said that UE6 would unify UE5 and Unreal Editor for Fortnite into a single product, allowing developers to build and deploy to traditional platforms, Fortnite, or their own live and potentially multi-product ecosystems. Epic detailed three key initiatives of Unreal Engine 6 at the keynote, most notable of which was the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) like Claude, Gemini, and others. The AI models in UE6 will help developers focus on essential creative and technical tasks instead of time-consuming manual tasks, Epic said. The company said that the generative AI models will play a "central role" in helping developers build content faster while maintaining creative control and reducing the "tedious work." Additionally, UE6 will include a new gameplay framework known as Scene Graph, built on Verse, the company's next-generation programming model. Finally, UE6 will allow content and code to be portable across games and engines. This interoperability means that assets such as Fortnite cosmetics can be shared between games built on the engine. "UE6 will keep doing the things you want Unreal Engine to do. Rendering will keep getting better. Cook times will come down. Iteration loops will get tighter. Mobile is increasingly capable," Epic said in a blog post. Unreal Engine 6 is targeting Early Access release at the end of 2027, with the full release of UE6 coming 12-18 months later. Unreal Engine 5.8 Now Available At the State of Epic event, Epic Games also confirmed the release of Unreal Engine 5.8 major update, which brings a performance boost, faster in-engine character and animation creation tools, and a range of improvements that streamline game development workflows. The latest update to the engine introduces Mesh Terrain, a new 3D-mesh-based system for designing larger, more complex terrains, Epic said. Other new features in Unreal Engine 5.8 include improved virtual production, high-fidelity full-body performance capture, accelerated content creation with integrated LLM workflows, and more. Additionally, real-time rendering and lighting enhancements mean that games that rely on global illumination can run on Nintendo Switch 2 at 60 fps, Epic said. This means we're likely to see better performance from games built on Unreal Engine on the Switch 2. UE 5.8 is the last planned major Unreal Engine 5 release as Epic moves to ramp up work on UE6, the company confirmed. "We will continue to support UE5 for bug fixes and regressions and may add another official release if circumstances warrant it," Epic said.

Finding the Fun Is Still Human Work for 20+ Years, But AI Could Spark a New Gaming Renaissance, Says Dev

Epic's recent announcement that Unreal Engine 5.8, and even more so the upcoming Unreal Engine 6, include integration with Claude and Gemini (as well as support for custom models) 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" was predictably met with skepticism from the anti-AI crowd. Still, that's not a universal reaction. Other veteran developers, such as Rich Vogel (whom I interviewed a few months ago on the state of the MMO genre), are far more pragmatic and believe that AI could genuinely help in some areas. In a LinkedIn post, Vogel noted that this is nearly the end of an era for game development (a sentiment echoed by longtime Unreal Engine product lead Sjoerd De Jong, who's leaving Epic), with AI sure to be "entrenched in the overall process". However, he added that there's no chance of real people not being involved in the production of gaming content, particularly as "finding the fun is too complex for AI to replicate, at least not in the next 20 years". Vogel also reckons that most assets will still be developed by humans, with AI being largely used in pipelines for shaders, textures, animations, rigging, and concepting, as well as in QA and localization. Smaller teams will be able to produce more content faster because AI enables them to iterate more quickly, though the veteran developer also warned about the hidden costs of using AI, such as rising token consumption to generate complex code. However, he ended on a positive note: I definitely see many more tools entering game production pipelines in two years, enabling developers to build content faster and create new emergent gameplay never before seen in games. When we see new AI emergent gameplay never before seen in games, that is when the true Renaissance in game development begins. So far, the most respected gaming studio division to embrace AI is PlayStation Studios. Parent company Sony revealed last month that its first-party developers are already automating repetitive workflows, enhancing productivity in software engineering, and speeding up processes in fields such as quality assurance, 3D modeling, and animation with the help of innovative AI-driven tools. However, they're far from the only ones. Asian game developers and publishers have been particularly open about it, with Square Enix, CAPCOM, NetEase, Tencent, Nexon, and NC all pushing toward that direction, partly because there is far less cultural backlash over there. If they are successful, the rest of the gaming studios from the West might be forced to follow. Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.

Epic reveals AI-integrated Unreal Engine 6, will "change a lot about how games are made"

AI integration at the forefront of gaming's biggest engine might raise more than a few eyebrows, but Epic promises that human creations will still be at the heart of UE's games. 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.

Epic Games Loses Level Design Legend Sjoerd de Jong After 12 Years As Unreal Engine 6 Embraces AI

Epic Games provided some additional information on Unreal Engine 6 as Unreal Engine 5.8 is set to be the final major update to the current generation engine. The integration with UEFN, the and AI models like Claude and Gemini, alongside the eventual deprecation of the Blueprints visual scripting system and Actors framework, is making more than a few fearful that AI will completely take over game development, and Epic's reassurances that this won't happen are not enough to calm these fears, as the company has lost veteran and legendary level design guru Sjoerd "Hourences" de Jong just as the new version of the engine was announced. "After 27 years of Unreal Engine, and 12 years at Epic Games and Unreal Engine I have decided to move on. Last week was my last week at Epic," wrote De Jong in a LinkedIn post. "This has been an awesome ride that has been truly life changing in so many ways. I didn't have an easy childhood or youth and things weren't going anywhere, but all of that changed entirely when I discovered Unreal Engine. Unreal Engine 1/2/3 put me on a very interesting trajectory for life, which in turn had a profound impact on myself as a person, my personal growth, and opportunities that opened up." Having stayed with Epic through the Unreal Engine 4 and Unreal Engine 5 eras, the legendary level design guru - who penned books on classic development such as The Hows and Whys of Level Design and handcrafted one of the iconic maps of Unreal Tournament 2004, DM-Rankin - Sjoerd de Jong facilitated the changes in game development, visiting "hundreds" of studios, presenting "hundreds" of talks and supporting "millions" of developers. "But all of that being said, I feel like this era has come to a close, and it is time to move forward. The industry is in a very interesting place. The games industry has always been an industry where change is relentless and inevitable, but it feels like we are reaching a pivotal point now and a potent mix of things," Sjoerd de Jong said. Although no specifics are mentioned, it's impossible not to connect Sjoerd de Jong's departure from Epic Games to the announcement of Unreal Engine 6 and its heavy integration with Claude and Gemini. With AI already powering world generation in Unreal Engine 5.8, it's undeniable that this will be taken to the next level in Unreal Engine 6, which threatens to alter game development as no other version of the engine has before. For someone who spearheaded handcrafted level design, UE6's direction must be going against everything they championed. Still, the legendary level designer keeps a positive outlook towards the future. "As much as I love the old way of working, I think it would be strategic to come to terms with where this is heading, and to work out how to adapt and excel at solving the challenges and opportunities that we face," De Jong concluded. At the time, there's no risk of AI taking over game development and delivering games on par with those created by actual developers. Although impressive from certain standpoints, a solo developer's attempt to use AI agents to create their own version of GTA 6 resulted in the recreation of the wrong city, and with the new Unreal Engine 5.8 Model Context Protocol (MCP) slowing the build. However, as AI is rapidly evolving, it is difficult to predict what the future holds for the many games that will surely be powered by Unreal Engine 6. Let's just hope actual game developers will remain in control to propel gaming towards a true next-generation that is not dictated by a model with no creativity. Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.

Unreal Engine's AI push sparks backlash as developers fear the end of Blueprints

Epic Games' latest Unreal Engine showcase has reignited debate over the growing role of generative AI in game development, with developers split over what the company's expanding toolset signals for the future of creative work. Much of the discussion has been shaped by Epic's evolving direction for Unreal Engine 6, where the company is moving toward tighter integration between Unreal Engine and Unreal Editor for Fortnite, alongside a broader shift toward the Verse programming language. While this doesn't amount to the removal of existing systems, it has raised questions about how long-established tools like Blueprints will sit alongside the next generation of workflows. Blueprints is a node-based visual scripting system that allows developers to build gameplay systems without writing traditional code, and has become important for indie teams and smaller studios. For example, indie hit and BAFTA-winning game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 made heavy use of Blueprints. Even in AAA production, it is widely used for rapid iteration and gameplay prototyping, and the perceived shift away from Blueprints has raised concerns, particularly among those learning game development and those new to Unreal Engine. Epic's messaging around this transition has been more measured than some of the online reaction suggests. In response to concerns about long-term changes, the company has described 'deprecation' as a gradual process in which features may stop receiving new updates before eventually being retired. At present, there is no formal timeline indicating the removal of Blueprints, and Epic has not stated that it will be replaced outright. Crucially, as this Verse is being revealed and the roadmap for Unreal Engine 6 is set, Epic has also continued to expand its suite of AI-assisted tools. These include systems aimed at speeding up production workflows, such as animation assistance, asset generation support, and use of emerging tech like Nvidia ACE, for more dynamic NPC behaviour. Epic has consistently framed these tools as 'productivity enhancements' rather than as replacements for artists, designers, or programmers, positioning them as optional layers within existing development pipelines rather than as fundamental replacements. Even so, the reaction within the wider development community has been far from settled, and for some, the combination of new AI tools and Verse over Blueprints feels like the early stages of a broader shift in how games are made, with concerns about increased pressure for faster iteration, lower costs, and greater automation. Spectra on X perhaps goes overkill, but it's a point shared by many: "If Epic stops supporting Blueprint, it will single-handedly kill the entire Unreal Engine educational ecosystem. The announcement of UE5 back in 2020 was exciting; the announcement of UE6 today carries with it the foreboding stink of death." Others view it more pragmatically, as part of a long-running trend toward efficiency in game engines. @amrhsn offered a more positive take: "I have been a Unity developer for 13 years and I am planning to port to Unreal because of this... and the new AI generation features. This would enable single developers to create a much bigger games in scale than Red Redemption or Elden Ring." Much of the negative reaction to this news about Verse and the depreciation of Blueprints comes from what Epic is implying in its State of Unreal keynote, rather than from what the future of AI and Unreal means. While Epic presents AI tools and features as optional, critics argue that embedding them so deeply into Unreal Engine inevitably nudges studios toward adoption and the eventual dropping of Blueprints, especially when teams come under pressure to iterate faster and produce more content on lower budgets. Some fans counter that Unreal Engine has always been a productivity-focused platform, and that AI is simply the latest evolution of that philosophy, with LLMs making things easier, but they need a coding language to work from and node a visual scripting setup. They point to potential gains for indie developers and smaller studios, who may benefit most from faster prototyping and reduced technical overhead. @RobertJALA on X makes the point: "Not saying this is right, but the real reason behind this is because it's much easier for LLMs to work with an actual scripting language than it is the blueprint representation of logic. With LLMs taking over as the predominant coding method, Epic is definitely leaning into that." The result is a familiar split across the industry: whether AI in features represents a neutral or indeed good production tool for efficiency, or the beginning of a broader shift in how creative jobs will be affected and even replaced in game development. That Unreal Engine is the latest to push the idea of more AI at the expense of a tool - Blueprints - people love and value, has merely laser-focused an already raging debate.

Epic Games Integrates Claude and Gemini into Unreal Engine 6, but Insists the Editor Is Still in Developers' Hands

During the State of Unreal 2026 presentation, streamed live from Chicago's Unreal Fest, Epic Games announced the launch of Unreal Engine 5.8 and also talked in depth about the upcoming Unreal Engine 6, first teased last month during the Rocket League Championship Series 2026 in Paris. Founder, CEO, and majority shareholder Tim Sweeney took the stage to explain that UE6 is about evolving how games are shipped and operated, not just improving rendering or world-building: The vision is that if you build things once in Unreal Engine 6, then you can have a game you can ship everywhere, including the console stores, PC stores, mobile stores, and ship live with the Fortnite ecosystem or any other UE6 game built by any other developer. So, UE6 is the unification of UE5 and Unreal Editor for Fortnite into a single engine, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. The new engine is powered by Verse, the new programming language designed for massive persistent worlds where global state and transactional concurrency are handled by the runtime. Verse's transactional system can roll back and resimulate work, and Epic wants to scale this into a distributed system across multiple servers. That means developers could write game logic in a simpler, single-machine style while the engine handles distribution behind the scenes. Scene Graph is Epic's new gameplay framework for UE6, built from scratch on Verse. It is meant to be a modern, high-level structure for creating games and experiences more easily, while also making interoperable components reusable across different games. In other words, it is not just a replacement layer for old gameplay code; it is part of the engine's new foundation. Another key theme during the presentation was portability. Epic says UE6 will push beyond basic extensibility into open specifications for interoperability, including support for formats like glTF and USD where they fit. Fortnite cosmetics will be the first major proof point, with the ability to use Fortnite outfits in other games and build compatible outfits for Fortnite itself. The idea is to create shared value for players and a shared economy for "smart assets" that can work across games. However, arguably the most talked-about segment will be the one dedicated to integrating LLMs into Unreal Engine 6. Using an MCP (Model Context Protocol) plugin, Epic exposes a broad set of engine capabilities to the model of choice, whether that is Claude, Gemini, or a custom model. This is an optional workflow layer inside Unreal that lets a model help build content while the developers stay in control. The model is not replacing the editor; it operates through it, with Unreal still serving as the place where everything remains editable. Developers start with a prompt or task, and the model then uses MCP to inspect the scene and act on it. In the demo, Epic showed how to add furniture to a room, extend that into a city, place roads and buildings, and then iterate on lighting, materials, and effects. Semantic search helps retrieve relevant assets from the asset library, so the model can find a sofa, lamp, chair, or city asset that matches the developer's request. Creators can then jump in and adjust any part manually, which is the whole point: broad automation from the model, precise control from the developer. On the UE6 blog post, Epic wrote: Thus, 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. The AI side is meant to plug into content creation, not sit beside it as a separate tool. For game teams, that means the model can help with level assembly, character setup, code assistance, crash analysis, and test generation. For film and media teams, it can also eventually drive image and video workflows: build a styleframe, restyle a viewport, generate video from a shot, or use scene data to guide image models. The same foundation supports all of that because MCP gives the model access to Unreal's scene, assets, and workflows. LLMs aren't great at thinking spatially, but Epic has already accounted for that by providing over 80 foundational Procedural Content Generation building blocks, a library of examples, and Skills that encode specific Unreal workflows, giving the model a safe, reusable way to assemble the result. Critically, everything remains under the developers' control, so it's up to them how much help they want or need from LLMs. By the way, while Epic talked a lot about using LLMs with UE6, the MCP server, the PCG Primitive Plugin, and the Skills they developed have actually shipped today as part of 5.8. Epic also stressed that they do not want a hard break from UE5. UE5 and UEFN will merge into one editor, and current projects should have a manageable path forward. Epic says Actors and Blueprints will remain in early UE6 versions, with conversion tools provided later once the new framework is mature enough. The target is UE6 Early Access at the end of 2027, followed by the full release 12 to 18 months later, so between late 2028 and, more likely, 2029. Meanwhile, Epic does not currently plan to release an Unreal Engine 5.9, but they said they are open to doing so if the need arises. Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.

In our interview with Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, he talks about why games are failing, what platforms can do to help, and how Unreal's AI tools can help "make content more efficiently."

"It shouldn't be understated how badly broken the social ecosystem is in gaming." A few hours after the State of Unreal keynote speech, founder and CEO of Epic Games Tim Sweeney, alongside EVP of development Marcus Wassmer, met with us to talk about everything new with Unreal Engine. They'd just announced that UE6 is set for early access at the end of 2027 with a 12-14 month period before its full launch, had developers on stage speak to how Unreal made their games technically possible, and, well, showcased AI tools being integrated in future iterations of the engine. It feels redundant to say at this point that the games industry is in unprecedented times, but it really is - at the convergence of unaffordable consumer hardware, development studios getting shuttered, and AI getting pushed onto everything in between; this is where we are. With Unreal Engine being so ubiquitous as the framework for which some of the biggest games are made, Epic and its tech has a major role in stewarding the games industry, as fallible as they may be. We talked about all that in the following interview, which you can read or watch below. IGN: How is UE6 going to change AAA game development? As it gets more expensive and tools get more advanced, it seems like the idea is to help create an environment that's more seamless for developers and to cut down on development time. Can you dig a little more into that as you transition over to UE6 in the coming years? Wassmer: I think it's two things - one, the efficiency of development. Games are getting bigger, games are getting more difficult [to make]. So, all the architectural work we're doing on the engine should just smooth things out. Not to mention AI creation flows. We showed some demos, and it really should take a lot of the tedium out of game creation and let people just actually focus on the creative part, which should be really nice. Then, the really cool thing, I think we're kind of inventing a new type of economy here, hopefully with the interconnected and interoperable assets between games, which I don't think has ever been done. I haven't seen it done at scale, at least anyway. Sweeney: I'm really looking forward to the increased simplicity. I wrote the first generation Unreal Engine and with every generation, out of necessity of taking advantage of new features of hardware and expanding the engine capabilities, we've made the engine progressively more and more complicated, to the point where it's somewhat daunting to open up Unreal Engine 5 and look at the five-level MUI nested menus in some cases. The C++ programming model really requires expert level programming, and the great cleanup in Unreal Engine 6 is to adopt the Verse scripting language that we've been pioneering in Fortnite with the Fortnite creator community and bring that into UE6 as the primary way to develop gameplay code. So, it brings the ease of development and programming that you have in an engine like Unity or Godot together with the full power of UE6 on the high-end AAA feature-sets. And to tame complexity of the engine, the ability to prompt a lot of different systems, and have it help you create a particle system and tweak it; it'll enable you to focus on the details that really matter rather than the boilerplate of creating and repeating the same rote actions over and over. It's going to be really freeing. I think it will bring back some of the magic that we had in earlier days that each engine had in its first few years before each engine grew more complex. It's just making it really easy to create stuff, giving the user an immense amount of creative freedom and the feeling that they can exercise it pretty easily without going off and spending hours or days on tutorials. IGN: While the State of Unreal keynote was more developer-focused, what would you say to someone on the outside looking in who's wondering how this affects the games they play? Sweeney: The biggest opportunity is for games to connect their economies. Not every game wants to connect every part of it; in some cases it's logical and in some cases it's not. But if you look broadly across games, there's an awful lot of stuff that could be shared in common. Every game with human [characters] could share emotes, and a lot of games with similar art styles could share characters such that from a player's point of view, it would be a whole lot more valuable if everything we bought that is cosmetic in nature worked across all of the different games that we owned. I think that creates a huge opportunity in the future for an ecosystem where there's lasting value created in the sense that whether or not you're playing the current game you're in, weeks, months, or years from now, the things that you've done and earned in it are of lasting utility to you as long as you're playing some game somewhere. Wassmer: On top of that, and just even more directly, I think we're going to continue to see small teams being able to punch above their weight. You take a look at Claire Obscur: Expedition 33 and No Law getting shown off - really small teams doing really, really impressive stuff. I think you're only going to see that trend accelerate as we go toward the UE6 era. IGN: One of the things that is also top of mind, especially for games built on Unreal, is performance and scaling for mid-level to low-end hardware. UE5 has had its ups and downs when it comes to playing well on handhelds, which have blown up with the Steam Deck and ROG Ally - and people are playing more PC games on lower-end specs. How is that being accounted for with UE6? Wassmer: I think we've actually been addressing it through 5.7 and 5.8 even, and I think the trend will continue through UE6. We're a game developer, too. Fortnite players have the same issues as anyone else and we try to scale from mobile all the way into high-end PC. You see initiatives like Lumen light we showed on stage as an effort to bring the costs of Lumen down to be accessible to more people for global dynamic illumination. We were showing off Mesh Terrain where you can see the new features we're building that's built inherently to scale from Nanite to non-Nanite platforms. So, when it cooks down for a non-Nanite platform, it just cooks down to regular meshes that should run efficiently and more efficiently than the old landscape system in most cases. So, it's really on our mind. I think you can see games lag a little bit in shipping on engine releases, but as more games kind of hit that 5.7 and 5.8 mark, I think you'll already see a trend toward efficiency. We have a ton of stuff in the pipeline as we progress towards UE6, and that's going to land in the engine as well. Sweeney: It's the cumulative set of optimizations that have been done. We have Fortnite back on mobile, we're putting a lot of effort into optimizing the engine so that a developer can ship a game and run on everything from the highest end hardware all the way down to low-end Android and several-year-old iPhones. Over time, we've also come to an increasing appreciation of the need to make the engine automatically scale much more of the content in the game. It's always been the case that with enough effort and trickery, a developer could make their game run on low-end devices. But the more our systems like Nanite can automatically scale, the better. That's going to be a source of ongoing attention. IGN: As people who have worked with bleeding edge tech for many years, I want to get your perspective on the increasing cost of hardware - even mid-level hardware just to engage with games that are built on these pretty sophisticated technologies. Does it cross your mind when working on new versions or builds of the engine, do you account for that? And what's your perspective on the unprecedented times with pricing and hardware availability? Sweeney: Well, it's an unfortunate and completely unexpected event that AI would surge so much and place so much competitive pressure on memory prices and everything to the point where it's significantly affecting the cost of gaming hardware. I think it's a temporary effect, but temporary over the next two or three years. I'm sure throughout Asia, there are massive fabs being built to manufacture memory at scales that will eventually relieve the supply pressure. In the meantime, we're going to have to be judicious and spend more time optimizing knowing that we can count less on Moore's Law to solve our problems for us, as the game industry has always done with or without intention. Wassmer: We definitely talk about it and think about it as we're doing development, for sure. As Tim says, you can't count on hardware trends to help us out at the moment. So, it is increasing the pressure for a push on optimization across mobile and mid-spec, for sure. IGN: It's interesting to see UE5.8 and UE6 using the MCP server and including support for multiple LLMs into its ecosystem. With this increasing ubiquitousness of AI, what's the role of AI in the game development process from your point of view? Wassmer: I think its role is as a helper where it's useful, right? You go look back at Codegen tools back in last November, they kind of weren't that great. Now they're pretty good, so you can pretty easily put them into engineering pipelines. I think the main thing is you want to make sure of is to use AI to reduce all of the tedium. All the tedious tasks, like, you don't need an engineer to go and spend half a day doing root cause analysis on a crash if you can have a thing do that for you in 20 minutes and then tell them what's going on so they can spend that time optimizing the engine instead, helping a content creator, or whatever. I think it's horses for courses and there will be places where it's not useful, there'll be places where it will. Sweeney: The whole space is moving so fast. We recognized early on that Epic should just broadly enable everybody to use the tools they prefer and be able to plug them into Unreal Engine in any way they want. We didn't go out to build like the Unreal Engine coding model, rather, we built an MCP server so that people could bring Claude code, Gemini, or whatever tool they prefer and connect it. Every week or two, there are going to be new capabilities coming out with lots of different companies competing, and we want to be able to support them all and put each game developer in charge of how they want to integrate AI tools into their pipelines to get maximum usefulness out of it and figure out what really gets acceleration maximized. IGN: There will always be concerns about artistic intent. We saw the demo of how you can build a virtual world foundationally with MCP and Claude coding. There are a lot of people who are on no-AI policies, and these kinds of things get marked on Steam pages as using generative AI. So, when it comes to building worlds and building games, I want to get your thoughts on preserving artistic value when it comes to using AI. Wassmer: Sure, we're building all the pipelines in Unreal to maximally preserve artistic intent. We gave the demos and you can see every step of the way. Our intention is, whatever gets built is a real Unreal scene that people can tweak and make exactly the way they wanted it to be rather than just typing into the prompt and trying a million times to get whatever pops out right. It's really meant to help people explore creatively more quickly, then settle in on the details of what they actually want, and then do the tweaks they need by hand right in the engine. So for us, it's human control all the way through the pipeline. Sweeney: Yeah, exactly that. You know, gaming has always been driven by great games built by great development teams and that will continue to be the case. Every generation has had its stereotypical low quality games, from just plain old bad games to asset flips and now we'll have AI slop. But in the hands of awesome professional creators and serious indies building a game, these tools are just an accelerant. And just as the industry moved from pixel art to Photoshop and then from 2D to 3D, these are just going to be ways to make content more efficiently and avoiding the drudgery of handwiring a giant blueprint and debugging really complicated problems in a program. IGN: I also want to get your perspective on the physical cost of using AI when it comes to data centers and energy usage, and your thoughts on the impact of AI outside of artistic intent. Is that something that is at the top of your mind or are you looking at this as just enabling the tools in Unreal? Is that something that you account for? Sweeney: I think that's for the model providers to sort out. Some of them are operating at a loss such that there's actually a higher cost than they're charging to try to grow their businesses. Then there are trade-offs between local AI and server-based hosted AI. I think the whole industry is going to have to sort that out. With our part, Epic doesn't have billions of dollars to invest in building a bleeding edge model to compete with these things. What we can do is build an awesome MCP interface so that every one of them can talk to our engine and so on. I think developers and the market are going to ultimately sort that out, and I think there's plenty of incentive for everybody to do these things efficiently. Cost is going to be formidable when you're using a bleeding edge model at its maximum capability. And optimizing that is going to be a first-class objective for everybody. IGN: You've been in the business for a long time, and along with the unprecedented times with hardware cost, it's also unprecedented times with AAA studios more or less collapsing. We've seen big name developers either cutting significantly or being shut down by parent companies. Being part of game development for so many years, I want to get your thoughts on the contraction of a lot of these bigger studios and where you think things are going wrong. What lessons do you think need to be learned from all this? Sweeney: I guess I've been around the longest. But you can't say that this is the first time the industry has gone through a shakeup because there have been many before. I was a young gamer in the 1980s when the Atari crash happened, and the transition from 2D gaming to 3D when suddenly a lot of the games at the time that were being developed ended up not finding a market. And then BitTorrent hit the industry pretty hard, too. There was a time when the industry rumor was that Crysis had sold 100,000 copies and 10 million people had played it. And the solution to that was multifaceted. Every technology generation, whether it's seven or ten years - changes accumulate so much that the way people build games and play games changes. The answer can't be that every generation we just spend exponentially more on game development because the market doesn't always support that. And I think we've seen some very specific problems with specific games. Sometimes a really big budget game ships that wasn't very good and didn't sell. But much more often as we've seen with a bunch of the big multiplayer games - it could be a good game - the market dynamics prevented players from coming in simultaneously with enough scale to make it viable. We should set aside flukes where a game didn't meet expectations of gamers and just look at more of the structural changes. And those are really appreciable, the fact that games are becoming increasingly multiplayer. And not just multiplayer but social, where you're getting together with your friends and then you're deciding what to do, what to play, and how to play it. This trend of the gaming economy shifting - some people like it and some don't - is going more and more towards buying things in games rather than buying games. In-game economy is driving gaming, especially at scale and especially over long durations as you see with these long-lasting multiplayer games. You have much more of a winner-takes-all phenomenon where it's really hard for any new entrant to compete with an established game, even if it is incrementally better. After years of established games continually reinvesting and making the game better, it's hard for a new entrant to compete with a game that's had many years of development and potentially billions of dollars of development investment going into it over time with a small team building a small game. Those are the huge challenges and those are generational, different challenges than you've seen in the past. Each of them was kind of an isolated problem that had a solution [before], and here the answer has got to be pretty broad change in the way that everybody goes about developing games. We've got to develop better games more consistently and we've got to develop them a lot more efficiently. The only way that we can hope for new games coming into the market to be able to succeed when there's so much Metcalfe's Law at play and so many captive audiences in the really big games - you know, Fortnite, Roblox, PUBG Mobile, and a few other really huge ones - it's got to be that those games get momentum by connecting to the economies in other games. I think that can really reinvigorate the market if people are constantly looking to new games and sources of new items that they can earn everywhere and be able to really easily move together with their friends. It shouldn't be understated how badly broken the social ecosystem is in gaming as a whole. Most games now are broadly multi-platform. You have a lot of games that are across mobile, a lot of games that are across PC and console, and then you have games that are across all platforms like Fortnite and Roblox where the game is literally on every platform everywhere in the world. For those to compete against that sort of thing, you've got to build games that run everywhere and be able to have social connections that work everywhere. If you look at Epic and a number of other independent multiplatform game developers, we've built social ecosystems for that. Your Fortnite friends are your friends across all platforms. You can connect with them; an iOS player, an Android player, an Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch player, and a PC player. And, like, we bled for that. We had a pretty big confrontation with Sony in which we ultimately got a cross-platform play across consoles sorted out in 2018, and we're grateful for that and the industry is better off for it. But still, most game developers are locked into these single-platform ecosystems. Xbox voice chat doesn't chat with PlayStation voice chat, and Nintendo's a separate thing still. All these players on Steam can't talk to their friends on Xbox and PlayStation unless they're playing a big game that's developed as a bespoke custom system. One of the solutions to this has to be making social work across all platforms natively and naturally, and getting all the platform holders and all the big game makers to work together to make that happen. I think it's in everybody's interest to do so, like, massively so. I think every platform would have a lot more engagement, and every game acting through the system would have a lot more engagement if we connected things, literally. Not just Epic, but name all of the top game developers, I think Xbox, Epic, Roblox, Riot, Tencent, EA, all the different studios within Microsoft - we'd all be better off if we connected our stuff. We'd all be making more money and our gamers would be happier, so it'll be just a great outcome for the world. Michael Higham is an editor at IGN who regularly contributes with reviews, previews, features, and news in written and video form. He's usually entrusted with covering long RPGs and tech products, but he's got range when it comes to games. You'll also catch him at events and hosting video content, including IGN's weekly podcast Unlocked.

Epic is rebuilding Unreal Engine from the ground up: Here's everything that's changing with UE6

Unreal Engine has been the backbone of Fortnite, Borderlands, Black Myth: Wukong and many other games so whenever Epic announces an update for it, it is usually something worth taking a look at. Today Epic spoke not just about the latest update to UE5 but also had an entire post focusing on the direction they are taking for UE6 and I think it would be fair to say that they are mixing things up with this one for sure. Also read: Not just design: Marvell's Navin Bishnoi on next chapter of Indian semicon and AI datacentre story UE6 is not going to be just an incremental upgrade - it is the merging of two engines that have been running parallely for years. UE5 and Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN), which Epic has been battle-testing inside one of the most-played games on the planet, are being brought together into a single unified product. If you have been following UEFN at all, you already have a preview of where UE6 is headed. The biggest shift is in how games are actually programmed. Epic is ditching the existing C++ Actor framework as the primary programming model and replacing it with something called Scene Graph, built entirely on a new language called Verse. Before you panic, Verse is designed to feel familiar to anyone who has worked with Python or C#, but it does something that no mainstream game engine language really does today: every function runs as an atomic transaction. What that means in practice is that game logic can be rolled back and resimulated automatically when something goes wrong, which becomes incredibly powerful when you start scaling up to massive multiplayer worlds. Epic also wants to eventually distribute Verse code across multiple servers automatically, so a developer could write their game as if it runs on a single machine while the engine handles the server-side complexity in the background. Save states, which have traditionally required separate database infrastructure, would become as simple as declaring a global variable. Also read: AI is beating human doctors in two key areas, and it's a good thing On top of the programming overhaul, Epic is pushing hard on content portability. The goal is for assets, logic and even in-game economies to work across different games and engines using open standards. Fortnite cosmetics are the first test case, with Epic planning to let players use their entitled Fortnite outfits in third-party games and vice versa. It sounds like a Fortnite feature but Epic is framing it as a proof of concept for a much larger idea: a shared economy of smart assets that travel with players across an interconnected ecosystem of games. The third pillar is AI integration, with Epic exposing engine capabilities through the MCP protocol so developers can plug in models like Claude or Codex directly into their workflow. The targets are the tedious parts of game development: rigging, skinning, lighting setup, level population -- the stuff that eats time without necessarily requiring a lot of creative judgment. UE6 Early Access is targeted for the end of 2027. Actors and Blueprints will still be present in early versions to ease the transition, but make no mistake, Epic is not just updating the engine. They are rethinking what a game engine is supposed to be.