Unreal Engine 6 Announced, Rocket League Showcased - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 24 May 2026 / 5,087 Views
Unreal Engine 6 has officially been announced during the Rocket League Championship Series 2026: Paris Major, which showcased a "new era" of the free-to-play vehicular soccer game, Rocket League, running on the engine.
Rocket League developer Psyonix was acquired by Epic Games in May 2019 and the game running on Unreal Engine 6 features improved visuals.
This is the first tease and announcement for the successor to Unreal Engine 5, which has been available since 2020. Epic Games and Psyonix have not revealed any details on Unreal Engine 6 and what the advantages are over Unreal Engine 5.
View Rocket League running on Unreal Engine 6 below:
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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Capcom should license out the RE Engine. Then we could have a good Japanese competitor.
Not all engines are the same and can do the same things. Some engines are better at somethings. RE Engine and ID Tech are amazing engines but something about UE5 makes it a go to choice for many devs. Maybe its pricing.
RE Engine isn't available outside Capcom. So, it is not an option for any other developer to license - I think that was the point SanAdreasX was making. Out of the engines that you can license, the major ones are Unreal Engine, Unity, CryEngine and sorta ID Tech. And out of those, Unreal Engine (even with its problems) has by far the best developer environment and support teams.
The fact that people still blame engine is unbelievable to me.
Most UE5 games are horribly optimised, let's hope they learnt their lesson
Does UE5 even work correctly?
It really doesn't, and the fact people think this engine is good continues to baffle me. Those pretty screenshots they see in isolation compared to actual gameplay keeps fooling them I guess.
Wow, Unreal Engine 5 has been a piece of shit for 6 years. What is greater than a piece of shit?
Curiously it's still a popular engine, and no one's risen to create a better competitor. I wonder why? Perhaps it's just pretty good, all things considered, even with its flaws.
Popularity does not equal quality, that's an appeal to majority fallacy. Halo Campaign Evolved and Life is Strange Reunion both have basic stability issues, just as random examples.
If you want 'competitor' engines, look at Source 2, still in its infancy, but looks comparable and runs just as well. People only default to UE5 because it's institutionalized and the de-facto engine outside of proprietary ones (although I could then point to the RE engine, which looks fantastic and has no such problems with performance).
I expect no real improvements from UE6, except worse performance and only ever looking 'pretty' in screenshots.
UE4 and 5 are great because they make making games very easy. It's still up to developers to properly optimize.
The issue is a lot of developers not being selective enough in their features usage. Yes lumen and nanite are heavy, but these aren't mandated features. Developers need to gauge more what their render budget is and work around that.
Arc raiders shows how you can use UE5 without nanite/lumen, make a stunning game and have it run super smoothly.
If you look to Sonys 1st party/2nd party games, you'll see the best way to approach this gen of hardware so far has been to be a bit more conservative with Raytraycing & virtual geometry features. A lot of UE5 games are pushing raytrayced GI and reflections, and shadows and then doing virtual geometry and then wondering why they run like crap lol
My understanding of the timeline is UE5 was announced six years ago and released four years ago.
So we probably have two years to wait until the release version of UE6.
Meanwhile UE5.8 will release in about a month.
I thought the announcer was made of unreal engine lol
Did it just jump from Unreal Engine 3 to 6?
Id guess UE5 was a poorly designed engine, they needed to release UE6 sooner.
Odd. I didn’t think UE5 had reached maturity yet.
Still some notable optimisations to be gained on the roadmap for this year.
Quite probably some better technologies at the core of it,
but I wouldn’t be surprised if it took another three years for UE6 to mature after release
and have clear advantages over UE5.
It doesn't matter if it's mature or not. A new major version has more freedom in revamping things, so e.g. if there's poor design choices, they can be revamped in a new major version. In a minor version update, you tend to keep things compatible with old versions so updating is easier for developers, should they wish to do so.
I’d expect the base of the engine to be a bit sounder with UE6.
I wasn’t impressed with some of the stock features of UE5.
Just takes a couple of years to build up documentation and turn experimental features from launch into something more efficiently implemented and better supported.
I can still see a lot of projects sticking with some version of Unreal 5 during those first three years after release unless they really need a new feature to make something work.
Depending on the project there can be a fair bit of work involved in updating a game to the newer point version of Unreal Engine and the like.
But yeah not great foundations with Unreal Engine 5 and a lot of projects with gameplay in bigger spaces are hoping 5.8 can at least sort out a few notable inefficiencies to make games like Borderlands 4 feasible scaled down to Switch 2 and the like.
I know updating even to a new minor version can be a fair bit of work - but the bigger the changes, the more work it's going to take to update.
My impression is that many of the perceived issues with UE5 are a result of UE5 not making optimizations as easy as they could be and devs not optimizing their games as well as they arguably should. If correct, I'd say that's more of a dev issue than an engine issue, although it puts some pressure on Epic to improve UE, which I think is a good thing regardless.
I don't know a lot about UE5.8, but based on, uh, I think The Witch 4 presentation, it did sound like it'd bring some nice improvements.
I don't know very much about the issues and their root causes in UE5, but like I said, I imagine Epic has more leeway in addressing them in a new major version than a minor version, i.e. if they've revamped those less sound parts of the engine in UE6, I don't see why they'd have to get UE5 to a more mature state first. Of course in practice, I'd expect them to address some issues in UE6 and leave then less mature in UE5, and also not touch upon some, uhm, less than ideal parts of UE5 in UE6.
Also, tech keeps moving forward, so I guess Unreal Engine too needs to keep moving forward, including in ways that's hard to pull off in an old version.
Unreal Engine 6 will be very needed by the time it is released to other developers outside Epic.
5.8 seems the last of the updates to offer notable optimisations. Feels like a lot of the experimental stuff being worked on is bridging technology until UE6 comes out.
