Fortnite's powerful Unreal Engine 5 editor lets players make their own games

^{Image: Epic Games}

Anyone can now make their own games inside Fortnite using Epic Games' new modding tools.

Epic Games is giving Fortnite’s content creators the keys to the kingdom. During this week’s Game Developers Conference, the developer revealed a new tool called the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) that will allow anyone to create their own games inside the game. This tool will also allow them access to Unreal Engine 5 assets, which means that players will get to use the engine’s full slate of powerful next-gen features. 

Here’s Epic Games’ demo of UEFN:

Essentially, UEFN allows players to publish Unreal Engine 5 projects directly in Fortnite, which is similar to how Roblox works with its library of user-created games. Fortnite’s current creator-made content is limited by the in-game assets players have access to, but UEFN will fully let them off the leash. UEFN will give content creators the full Unreal Editor toolset, which includes motion capture technology like Metahuman and lighting features like Lumen. 

To break it down further, this means that you can create games inside Fortnite that are nothing like the main battle royale mode. The demo above shows a third-person shooter that takes place in a surprisingly photorealistic war-torn environment, complete with cutscenes and a day-and-night cycle. The demo then evolves into a bossfight with a gigantic mecha, where the player ducks behind obstacles and fires off rocket launchers. The actual gameplay looks similar to Fortnite, but apart from its playable characters, very little else in the demo resembles the game. 

Epic has also announced that with UEFN’s tools, the company is retooling Fortnite’s creative economy to share revenue with content creators. It seems like the company is going all in on turning Fortnite into an ecosystem of its very own, and hoping that user-created content will keep it going for as long as possible. Epic is hoping for entire studios to start working on games inside Fortnite thanks to the new revenue split, but time will tell if the company gets its wish.