Epic merges UE5 and UEFN into Unreal Engine 6
At its State of Unreal in Chicago, Epic revealed that Unreal Engine 6 will combine Unreal Engine 5 with Unreal Engine for Fortnite (UEFN), bringing UEFN’s usability to the main engine. The unified engine aims to let creators build once and ship across platforms, while consolidating APIs like MetaHumans.
Six years after Unreal Engine 5 launched, Epic used its State of Unreal event in Chicago and a companion blog post to show the next major release. The biggest influence on Unreal Engine 6, Epic says, is Fortnite and UEFN — a simplified, pared-back version of UE5 that makes creating Fortnite maps and game modes very accessible. The usability of UEFN is central to UE6; Epic has long intended to remove the division between UE and UEFN and combine them in a single package. As Tim Sweeney put it: "UE 5 plus UEFN equals UE 6, plus some more cool stuff on the way." The merge is meant to let developers create and ship across every platform and storefront, including Fortnite, and to unify APIs and code across Epic additions such as MetaHumans.
