State of Unreal drew more than 2,000 developers in person and hundreds of thousands online—here’s a roundup of all the news.
State of Unreal 2026 Official 4K Livestream | Unreal Fest Chicago
I have a lot of mixed feelings about this one.
Firstly, as exciting as UE6 is in terms of being fully multithreaded, I feel going all-in on Verse and the Scene Graph and depreciating Actors and Blueprints is… not a good thing. Sure, having those things alongside Actors and Blueprints is what I was hoping for, but not having a visual scripting system to replace Blueprints feels like a questionable decision and I feel like Actors still have a place in the development ecosystem in terms of a more structured entity type that if you need to access it in programming you know will always have a specific set of specifications and components, whereas an entity-component system is more loosey-goosey, which has its its own benefits and issues.
Secondly, as I mentioned in the 5.8 release thread, declaring that it’s the last planned version when there’s so many experimental/beta features that haven’t been updated to definitively be production-ready (even stuff like CommonUI is still not “officially” production-ready, and you guys literally just released Substrate NPR Shading as experimental!), along with UE5 still having various optimization issues that need smoothing over, does not inspire developer confidence. I would at least like to see more versions of UE5 that avoid new features and just focus on tightening things up.
Lore is very exciting, though, considering Git LFS is an imperfect solution to binary files and stuff like Perforce and Plastic both being expensive and not exactly good, just a shame it’s still very much not production-ready yet.
And lastly, not a fan of the focus on “AI”, no matter what what you call it. Unless you guys are gonna go out of your way to show that it’s gonna be more than encouraging developers to engage in making AI slop, most folks are gonna cringe at the focus on using AI in gamedev (not saying there aren’t uses for machine learning that don’t result in such slop, but that’s the perception).
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Absolutely true. Totally agree with everything that @Candescence said above.
UE5 still contains important Experimental and Beta features, while UE 5.8 is now described as the last planned major UE5 release. This is a serious production risk for developers who are building and shipping games on UE5 today.
Developers cannot confidently build long-term production pipelines around features that may remain Experimental, Beta, unfinished, unstable, or unclear for shipping. If UE5 is the engine we are expected to use for real production over the next several years, then UE5 needs one more focused release – UE 5.9 – dedicated to performance, stability, regression fixes, and moving Experimental and Beta UE5 systems toward Production-Ready status.
UE5 should not be left in a half-finished state while everyone waits years for UE6.
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Your concerns are fair, especially with how big and fast these changes sound on paper.
Epic usually doesn’t rip out core systems like Actors or Blueprints suddenly. Even when new systems like Verse or Scene Graph are introduced, they tend to run alongside existing workflows for a long time because real production pipelines depend on them.
The “UE5 is the last version” idea is often misunderstood too—it usually means a shift in focus, not abandonment. In most cases, maintenance, optimization, and stability work continues even if fewer major features are added.
On AI, a lot of the pushback is about perception. There are useful applications in tooling and workflow automation, but Epic will need to clearly separate that from anything that looks like low-quality content generation.
And with things like Lore, the real question isn’t the concept—it’s whether it survives long-term use in shipped projects.
So overall, it’s reasonable to be cautious, but historically these transitions tend to be gradual rather than disruptive.
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I’ll echo the mixed feelings of others: Ditching Blueprints in favour of Verse essentially means throwing out an entire ecosystem of Indie Development for UE.
Quite a shocking change but also one that will put off a lot of the Indie Developers. Blueprint has served as an important on-ramp for new developers. There there’s also a whole landscape of work with BP going back as far as UE4 that serves as the ecosystem for new UE developers. It has been built by the UE community over many years. This is the ‘soft value’ that UE has for Indie Developers.
“Fortnite-ifying” the whole engine to be more like UEFN and discarding BP entirely for Verse would be equivalent to throwing all of this in the trash bin. I would not be surprised to see a mass exodus of BP developers and new actively avoiding UE if this is the case.
The idea that you can just rugpull an entire development language at any time is pretty absurd, this is roughly equivalent to if Unity suddenly said C# no longer works, go somewhere else. It is actively hostile to the engine and your developer community.
If this goes ahead it will leave me wondering - why stay with UE, when Verse will probably get the same treatment in a couple of years?
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@Flak I also see major downsides for the huge ecosystem of existing plugins, many of which are paid products and have been available since the UE4 era. A lot of them are heavily based on the Actor/Component framework or are built entirely around Blueprints (Ultra Dynamic Sky being just one example).
And what about UMG Blueprints, Animation Blueprints, and all the other Blueprint-driven systems? A visual version of Verse could certainly be a good addition, but completely overhauling the entire workflow and effectively creating a new engine seems like a very questionable decision to me.
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I love blueprints and verse looks like gibberish to me as a non-coder.
So if I’m forced to learn scripting, why would I waste time with verse over Python in Godot? Seems to me like Python actually has more uses even outside of Godot, over Verse.
Hopefully, they actually have plans to improve blueprints in UE6 instead of ditching everything majority of indie devs have been using for years.
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GDScript in Godot…
No blueprints PLUS AI built in? Well- goodbye Unreal. We had a good run.
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gg guys, you just told every developer and plugin maintainer that work on anything related to blueprints or the current unreal engine is completely worthless, without giving us any actual roadmap or timelines, just an AI authored recap. everything unreal learning related for the past 12 years is going to be consigned to the bin for no better reason than you want the whole thing to be UEFN.
this might be the biggest own goal in game development since crytek licenced cryengine to amazon.
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Garbage.
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The announcement regarding the future deprecation of Actors and Blueprints in UE6 has created uncertainty and many questions.
Blueprint is not just another feature. It is one of the core reasons I chose Unreal Engine in the first place. It allowed me to focus on building worlds, designing gameplay, and creating projects without having to spend years becoming a traditional programmer.
Epic Games spent more than a decade building, improving, promoting, and expanding Blueprint as a first-class development workflow. This tool allowed to create games without programming skills. This is especially important to me because I am building a massive world, performing practically all roles in development at the same time, game design, writing scripts and dialogues, level design, and I am not going to spend another five years learning the boring and tedious complexity of C++ or Verse.
Because of that, a statement such as:
“Actors and Blueprints will eventually be deprecated when the new framework is sufficiently mature”
cannot be presented without detailed clarification.
It is embarrassing that such a large company delivered such a poorly communicated announcement regarding such a fundamental change. If Blueprint is truly planned for deprecation in the future, this should have been accompanied by a detailed explanation from the very beginning. Instead, you provided a brief statement that immediately created uncertainty and confusion, leaving trying to guess what Epic actually intends. As a result, there are now far more questions than answers:
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What exactly replaces Blueprint?
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Is visual scripting going away?
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Will there be a visual version of Verse?
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Will there be a new no-code workflow?
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How will designers, artists, level designers, and non-programmers build gameplay systems in UE6?
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Is MCP intended to become a permanent part of the Unreal ecosystem?
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Is AI-assisted development meant to replace visual scripting, complement it, or coexist with it?
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What is Epic’s long-term vision for no-code development?
Blueprint is one of the defining pillars of Unreal Engine.
If Epic intends to move away from Blueprint, you should provide detailed clarification on the following points:
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The future of visual scripting.
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The future of no-code development.
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The relationship between Verse, MCP, AI tools, and gameplay creation.
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The migration path for existing developers.
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The long-term vision for developers who do not want to become traditional programmers.
The industry should continue moving toward progress: higher-level tools, no-code workflows, visual scripting, AI-assisted development, MCP-style creation pipelines, vibe coding, and LLM-powered programming. Development time should decrease, not increase. Technical barriers should be removed, not reintroduced. A future that pushes creators back toward old-fashioned text-based programming as the primary way to build gameplay would feel less like evolution and more like a regression from the direction the industry has been moving for years.
Reverse this decision or provide a detailed clarification within the coming days. One of the vices of creatures called humans is that they constantly create instability through ambiguity and by breaking systems that already work well. Improve, don’t break.
If you ultimately decide to remove Blueprints without providing an equivalent no-code replacement, I will either move to another engine or remain on Unreal Engine 5.8.
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I love Unreal Engine precisely because it offers a visual alternative to traditional programming. For me, and for other people who need that visual approach for our brains to work effectively, it feels like an incredibly hard blow that you’re removing it.
That made the news rather bittersweet, because there was so much else to look forward to with UE6. Unfortunately, removing the visual scripting language will mean that I’ll need to find another game engine in the future.
It’s really disappointing, because I genuinely love using Unreal Engine and Blueprints.
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@ EpicGames
For many releases, we have been patiently waiting for core engine stability fixes, performance optimizations, more frequent bug fixing support, up-to-date technical documentation, and preferably Mac support on par with PC… This presentation is a slap in the face! It lacks a clear vision, leaves beta/experimental features orphaned, discredits Actor/Blueprint based expertise, devalues the marketplace, and offends the entire community. It simply initiates a self-destruct sequence for the whole UE ecosystem that we all have contributed to for many years. Feels like a funeral.
For the sake of what? - “Metaverse”.
As a seasoned console/desktop video game developer with more than four decades of expertise in the industry, I have been using UE since 2009. Right after delivering the project that I’m currently contributing to, I believe saying goodbye to Unreal will be the right thing for me to do with respect to each and every second that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed developing games with the beloved engine. It has been a pleasure.
Very truly yours,
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This is what I think Epic should have done.
Announced they are working on a new engine but not called it UE6. Saying this is their vision for the future with verse, Fortnite ecosystem etc.
Announced UE6 as basically being UE5 but where the whole development focus is on improving existing features such as improving optimization, shader compilation, stability etc.
Announced that if things work out as planned the new engine might with community feedback become the mainline Unreal Engine some years down the line. UE7+
With this approach everybody is happy and EPIC can still take a big bold bet on the future of gaming with support of the community and not against it.
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This is very disappointing news to hear after developing with UE for 10 years. While I don’t mind having to write out some code, Blueprints is really what makes UE stand apart. With Epic getting rid of them, it looks like I’ll keep UE around for animation and VFX work, but not so much game dev. Plus I’m not excited for the Roblox and the AI feel for the next engine. I think UE6 will be a pass for me.
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So has there been any word on what their replacement for Blueprints would actually look like? Because all I’m getting from that one clip is that it’s a bunch of prefabricated stuff. Which is nice, but I’d expect it to be completely modular and as interdependent as the stuff that’s already existing
“Just stick an AI tool on it”
I thought we were already at that point with that chatbot that was revealed on here?