Unreal Engine 6: Epic shows first scenes in "Rocket League"
Epic has teased Unreal Engine 6 in "Rocket League" for the first time. A release date and feature list are missing.
(Image: Epic Games)
Epic Games on Sunday showed in-game footage rendered in the upcoming Unreal Engine 6 (UE6) for the first time. The company chose not "Fortnite" but the multiplayer title "Rocket League" as the first showcase game. Epic bought the original developer Psyonix in 2019.
A short teaser trailer shows the game with improved lighting and more detailed vehicle models, but not much can be gleaned from the short snippets. Epic Games has not yet published an accompanying blog post or press release.
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No date, no roadmap
Accordingly, it is unclear what Unreal Engine 6 can do and when it will be available at all – there is neither an early access date nor a public roadmap. The reason "Rocket League" is the showcase game is obvious: The game still runs on Unreal Engine 3 – the same version on which games like "Gears of War" were developed in 2006. Psyonix has never changed the engine despite multiple next-gen upgrades.
It is unusual for developers to switch to a new version of Unreal Engine after release, but not unprecedented. For example, the German development studio Rockfish Games migrated the space shooter „Everspace 2“ from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5 (UE5). The community expects Epic's own teams to keep games technically up-to-date – especially if they are continuously updated online games like "Fortnite" and "Rocket League".
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UE5 is four years old
Looking at Unreal Engine 5 makes it clear how long the road to widely available UE6 games will likely be. Epic fully released UE5 in April 2022 – over four years ago. Since then, many studios have switched, but many flagship projects are still in development. "The Witcher 4" by CD Projekt Red, which runs in Unreal Engine 5.6, can currently only be seen as a tech demo and has no release date.
Shader stuttering, unstable frame pacing, and performance drops in open-world games are among the known weaknesses of Unreal Engine 5, as demonstrated by "Oblivion Remastered" in spring 2025, among others. The announcement of Unreal Engine 6 is therefore met with skepticism in the gaming community: Epic should first fix the existing problems, according to many social media posts. (dahe)
