Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5 and Unreal Engine 6 teams are reportedly going all-in on vibe-coding the tools behind the majority of modern video games.
Alongside Epic’ virile pro-AI stance for Fortnite and its upcoming Disney collaboration game, the team behind Unreal Engine now uses AI for the majority of work. Coming after laying off 1,000 developers earlier this year, Epic is pushing its platform as an AI-first suite for game developers.
In a discussion with This Week in Video Games, executive vice president of development Marcus Wassmer confirmed that Epic’s AI-first stance includes the teams on Unreal Engine. “We are definitely using Ai to develop code and features for Unreal Engine,” Wassmer said.
Epic Games has been under fire in recent months for multiple situations, and it’s Pro-AI stance is one of them. Specifically, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has gone on days-long internet tirades against Steam’s AI disclosure method while also requiring AI disclosures on Epic’s own Fab marketplace.
In the interview, Wassmer confirmed that the vibe-coding of Unreal Engine “will also be extended to the engine’s next big numbered version”. Unreal Engine 6 has already been described as an AI-first game engine with AI features plugged directly into the toolset.
“Yes, we are vibe-coding things,” the Unreal Engine lead said. “That means our engineers are no longer writing the bulk of the code, but they are still guiding the tools to get the architectural result we want. We’re not ‘one-shotting’ the engine; we’re iterating with AI to ship features developers want and keep the engine within the memory, performance, and scalability envelopes.”
Wassmer explained that Epic Games doesn’t “ think it’s viable to take a halfway approach to AI in development”. He continued: “We think it’s best to just be up front with what we’re doing, share best practices with other developers, and make the best UE6 we can with the best tools available at any given time.”
Of course, many developers are not as pro-AI as Epic Games is, but Wassmer explained that Epic believes software development will require the use of AI anyway. In this sense, it does feel that Epic is enforcing AI development on developers wanting to use its tools, especially as some studios are inherently against the use of AI technology.
“We are more concerned about the risks of moving too slowly than we are about AI skepticism,” Wassmer said. “We think that in pretty short order doing AI development for basically all software will be ubiquitous because software done correctly with AI will simply be better and be more capable of responding quickly to customer feedback than software done without. The best way to counter any skepticism is through the quality of the games and tools we’re able to deliver.”
It’s worth noting that Epic Games’ Pro-AI push has seen mixed-to-negative responses so far. One of the studio’s earliest AI pushes was in Fortnite Chapter 7 which was filled with AI art last year. At the time, fans immediately pushed back against the horrendous quality of assets in the game.
Since then, the company has also re-launched the Epic Games Store with a new proudly-vibecoded launcher. The launcher, which was promoted as being faster than Steam, has even less features than its already lacking predecessor and is also extremely buggy.
As for how AI features in Unreal Engine 6 will go, well, we’ll have to wait. With the expense needed to create a custom engine, many studios need to rely on third-party tools. Unfortunately, as it stands right now, Unreal is the best option for studios working on AAA games. (Let’s face it, Unity isn’t even close.) If anything, it feels as if Epic is forcing AI into the hands of developers.
