Epic Games, the developers of Fortnite and the Unreal Engine graphics engine, have announced a new era for one of their most popular games: Rocket League. They did this during the Rocket League Championship Series 2026: Paris Major tournament, where they released a teaser about the future of the game, announcing the biggest change to it to date. A change of engine to Unreal Engine 6.
Rocket League at the forefront of technology
This marks the first announcement of the existence of Unreal Engine 6. Although it makes sense for Epic Games to announce that they are working on the engine given the timeline, since Unreal Engine 5 was unveiled in May 2020 and launched on April 5, 2022, for the current generation consoles, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, its adoption has been lower and much more questioned than the two previous versions of the engine. This raises the question of whether it is appropriate to make the leap to a new version, especially when Sony claims that PlayStation 6 is still in its development phase.
In any case, this could be good news for Rocket League fans. The game was released in 2015 and even today it still runs on the same graphics engine as at the time of its launch: Unreal Engine 3. But since Psyonix, the studio responsible for the game’s development, was acquired by Epic in 2019, they now have access to the latest versions of the engine before anyone else. Allowing them to be the benchmark for the capabilities of Unreal Engine 6.
Although we do not know specific details about Unreal Engine 6 or this new iteration of Rocket League, it is expected that they will be revealed in the near future. Until then, we can only speculate about what Epic Games might be doing to improve a engine that seemed to have already reached its peak with Unreal Engine 5. And both players and developers believe that it is far from being fully exploited.
