<----Noobiest Game Developer ever (Actually, let’s not even call myself that yet, until I ship something), so Noobiest, still in-school, learning UE4 and Game Dev student…that’s sound better:)
So let me give you all my view on this: In school, we are given a very “basic” course on UE4 and that’s only after a very basic programming class that is a requirement. Before that, I learned a bit of C++/C for a Computer Engineering degree. So I knew some basic terms before my class, and during the class, I got a nice refresher in OOP. But, it was hard, very very hard when I cracked open UE4. And while it’s getting easier 6 months later, I will tell you, I agree with the guys saying that documentation is lacking or outdated. A LOT of the awesome nodes that I would consider advanced, or not even advanced nodes, are poorly documented. Or examples just don’t make sense.
And also like someone said before, I understand that the groundwork of this Engine is based on UT, so FPS are the “main” focus, but I also understand that there are workarounds to making things happen. And I am sure that future releases will include better options to make other genres easier to develop for. But, it’s hard, if I wanted to make an FPS “exploration game” or “shooter” or whatever FPS, or platformer, calling up events would be easy. But if I wanted to do something like a turn based game, that’s going to be out of my league for quite some time via Blueprints as an amateur “programmer”. Blueprints is definitely great though, especially with the awesomeness of Epic’s examples and the community’s Epicness (see what I did there?), it’s a great stepping stone to doing something in the Engine. But is still requires A LOT of programming knowledge to take full advantage of.
If/when Epic can “break” that barrier, with the further development of Blueprints, I can see many many many great things in the future. Of course, it’ll never get to the level of C++ programmers (which I’m relearning on the side, Stroustrup’s Programming Principles and Practice Using C++ is quite the page turned I tell you…) which will want to keep their jobs:)
TLDR;
Blueprints is great for amateur/non-programmers to get their feet wet in the Engine, but it’s not going to replace traditional programmers for anything remotely advanced in gameplay but, with clearer documentation on everything, proper 0-100 tutorials/live streams on gameplay examples (I am looking at you Turn Based game example), I think we would see much more out of the community.
My 2 cents.