The Future Of Unreal Engine: New Features In UE5.6 & Beyond

Epic Games has released a recorded presentation from Unreal Fest Seattle 2024, the same event where they unveiled the highly anticipated Preview version of Unreal Engine 5.5. With the official release of UE 5.5 just a month away, many of the features shown are already available, while a few are still in active development.

In this video, Technical Director Arjan Brussee discusses updates to gameplay systems, platform support, and much more. These changes affect Unreal Engine 5’s world-building, rendering, animation, and simulation workflows, ranging from systems like PCG-powered “Megaworlds biomes” to a new high-performance unified animation pipeline, Anim Next.

Epic Games

While some features are expected to land in Unreal Engine 5.6 later this year, others remain without a set release date. In the comments section, you’ll also find timestamps for all the key sections that might interest you.

As always, please remember that all announced plans are subject to change, and the timeline for features may be adjusted as development progresses.

Epic Games

You can explore features currently in development for Unreal Engine 5 on Epic Games’ public board and also check out this video by Jim Bachalo, who experimented with Unreal Engine 5.6’s Lumen and the new ray-traced translucency:

We also recommend watching other official Epic Games presentations, such as this one that debunks common “best practices” and much more, available on their YouTube channel: