Unreal Engine 3 is powering some of the biggest games in the industry, from BioShock, Mass Effect, to Gears of War. Epic’s “easy” to use development tools have allowed the development of games to be handled less by programmers and more by artists, allowing the game to be as visually beautiful as it is technically proficient.

Speaking at Gamefest in Seattle, President and CEO of Epic Games Mike Capps told Gamasutra that the next version of the engine, Unreal Engine 4, will be ready for the next generation of consoles, “We’ve got Unreal [Engine] 4 in production right now… it’s going to be in the next console generation - our rough guess is 2012 [to] 2018.”

Tim Sweeney, the technical guru over at Epic also recently commented that the new version of their popular middleware will exclusively target Microsoft’s, Sony’s, and who knows maybe even Nintendo’s next consoles, “Version 4 will exclusively target the next console generation, Microsoft’s successor for the Xbox 360, Sony’s successor for the Playstation 3 - and if Nintendo ships a machine with similar hardware specs, then that also. PCs will follow after that.”