Personally, I’ve been using UE for several years now. It’s an incredibly flexible tool with all kinds of use cases and applications. I’m currently working on an animated show for kids and I find the workflow to be intuitive and powerful. The engine up until now has been the leader of the game engine pack - and I come from Unity where I still work from time to time but I personally enjoy the focus on providing a really in depth toolset to developers and creators out of the box. So let’s just say I’m an Unreal Engine fan, and 5 has been really fun to work with these last few years.
Now I follow each of the Unreal Fest “State of Unreal” webcasts and I enjoy following along with all the exciting feature updates and improvements. Seeing Nanite and Lumen for the first time was so cool and to this day stands out as a kind of technological moat that is hard to match with other software. But this year’s announcements have been very disappointing. It’s like Epic is panicked about AI and the state of generative creation and just decided to do a huge pivot right into that, and as a lifelong creator (I’ve been animating since I was 7), and just general art enthusiast, it really pains me to see this company take such a promising software and tool, used by so many incredibly talented artists and engineers, and just kind of give it all to generative AI. I’m sure some people want to use some of the generative tools, I don’t, but I don’t fault people for wanting to explore them. But it feels like they are being forced on us, from the pivot away from blueprints towards a text based language that is better for LLMs, to the barrage of gen AI demos in engine for both game asset creation and film and TV rendering - it’s just like going 100mph in the opposite direction that I would like to see the engine go.
Now, like I said, this is all my own opinion and I’d be curious what some other users think, but I can’t help but feel like in 5 years, UE is going to just be another Midjourney like tool, and all of it’s developers will either embrace that mindset and go all in on generating their games and movies, or it will lead to a mass exodus of the people who actually like the experience of toiling away on their project, bringing their own voices to it rather than let a computer speak for them from stolen works. And that is just the creators, what about all of the people that don’t want to play generated slop content? They will no longer look at UE or developers that use UE as being of interest to them.
I guess I’m writing this because I find it really disappointing (and this is coming from basically an unpaid evangelist of UE for the last few years because I really liked the creative choices Epic was making about their engine), and I hope some of this approach is reconsidered and maybe offer a more AI free default experience with optional connections to MCPs, generative tools, or whatever people want to incorporate in their pipeline. I think there is a way to keep the engine free from making that choice for it’s users and instead making it just another option that is easy to skip (i.e. the opposite of Adobe, etc). Anyway, just my 2 cents.