I think the Fortnite Creative community just sold their soul to the devil.
We were offered more power in our creations, and more money by a better economy, but what we didn’t know is that the ability to make content will not be fun and also 10 times longer.
Creative is a powerful tool that had some incredible tools, UX, and ways that facilitated an agile workflow, all forgotten once Epic decided to add plugins to UE and turn it into UEFN. Now even though I applaud the effort and the time it took (its an achievement in its own right, truly), in their journey doing so they left the infrastructure as is, and never understood what makes Creative fun and why Creative was growing steadily all those years. No use of macros, no use of AI, no use of visual methodologies, nothing taken from the UGC market from the past decade, instead they turned it into a gamedev engine hybrid with all the old ways of making a game.
Haven’t you learnt from Unreal Tournament that this is not enough? Creative is a genuine and fun building experience, without cooking, rendering, technical errors, advanced terminology, workarounds all over the place (ok maybe they are the same there), and waiting, LOTS of waiting. Unreal Engine IS boring, I am sorry to say, not because of its design, but because WE HAVE BEEN SPOILED by an even greater design, which is Fortnite Creative and UGC in general.
I have found myself not wanting to build games the past month, because the past 3 months have been the worst in my building career in terms of stress and annoyance. But I cant go back to Creative either, because its clear Epic is going to terminate it soon, with the amount of manpower sustaining it and the plethora of bugs. You cant even load into the mode as the button doesn’t even work. They didn’t hire UGC experts to run UEFN, they instead placed gamedev gurus, and they brought all their outdated methodologies with them.
It seems to me that the higher-ups in Epic Games know only game dev, but don’t know a thing about UGC and how it is STRUCTURED on agility and being able to make a game in a single day (max 2 weeks for large projects, 1 month for massive), and not in 2 months. I feel like I’ve been switched from a drug to orange juice and I am having withdrawal syndrome. When I made a full game in a single day, now I spend a single day trying to change a tag in my map.
My suggestion is this EpicGames: Start learning from Fortnite Creative / other UGC editors out there, and use their methodology on UEFN; whatever it takes. Create a consulting body of creators and start listening on what they have to say about UX and agility. UE devs will love what comes out of it too, those principles can be applied to any engine and will help devs make games 10 times faster (ratio is compared to what I ve built with UEFN and what I believe I would have built in Creative at the same time).
The past 3 months I had to increase the workload to stay in the same pace I once had in Creative, and its killing me. Not because of the extra hours, but I because I want, no actually I NEED, to have fun building again, or my content will turn into a soul-less grind and this is not what I am here for.
The creative community has to wake up and do something because each update Epic Games is moving away from what was fun/agile to build and only focuses on what is powerful.
What is done is done so now let’s make a change all together and make UEFN the best it can be. It CAN be done, so let’s do it. Keep the legacy of Creative alive within UEFN and make it mean something.