The Cycle is repeating

Latest update for UEFN/Creative massively broke both modes. I 've posted all issues and I keep finding new ones everyday. Opening projects in UEFN now give a lot of errors even for FN assets. Creative has its own share of bugs too, with barriers not being able to be stood on by players, and player contact setting no longer working for trick tiles (v1).

This needs to change. Release now and fix later is no longer a process that works when we have collectively poured so much effort into content both as a community and you guys as Epic, and even more with UEFN now. Having a chunk of your map missing, or not being able to launch live edit may be things that experienced creators may find ways to deal with, but new creators will be even more overwhelmed. The last update probably killed a lot of projects and broke more things than it fixed.

What is happening with QA? Creative is completely bust right now, I can name 40 issues off top of my head that hinder the experience for both players and creators. And UEFN is following the same trend now, with so many issues introduced in a single update, that it makes me wonder if large projects were tested with it before release.

Epic, you need to be a step ahead and find a way to deal with the lack of stability. I’ve been saying it for years now and it’s only getting worse. Autosave shouldn’t lag the editor and have your character teleport to a random location, and we should be able to see where the limit of what we build is, not get randomly locked at some point. Basic editor UX was fixed by UEFN because it used the UE framework, but there are so many issues with the core functionality of Creative and now UEFN that it makes building projects not fun. Sometimes, even game dev is easier than what we have to deal with, and both editors are meant to facilitate, not add obstacles and extra steps.

  • Please do a review of the entire process with creators, observe how they build, improve the UX, fix all the core 200 bugs that are in both modes, then finally ensure that no things break with updates (if they still do, add versioning like Minecraft, or let us use old versions for players to play the game)
  • Consider the cadence of updates to facilitate time for stable versions. Stability matters more than content itself in this stage. There is no point adding more things when no one can build something of substantial quality and sustain it.
  • Add bug bounties if your QA is overwhelmed. Pay creators who find serious bugs and report them, then you ll have a better insight on what to fix.

I agree, but i think a lot of bugs come down to the entanglement of Save the World and Battle Royale. Its a slow and probably difficult process that theyre no doubt tackling in chunks. Creative itself is supposed to be separated and one day we hope Epic achieves that.

Ultimately I think Creative and UEFN should receive updates on a less frequent cadence. Im fine with 1-2 months if it means a more rigorous QA period.

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100% agree! It’s super frustrating, the auto save especially. It’s at the point where we’re looking at moving all future projects to UE5 for improved editor stability and functionality whilst we block out and create the art for future maps. But that doesn’t solve problems for existing maps or mechanics used for gameplay in UEFN and creative breaking each update.

I really like not having to design all these complex systems from scratch (like vehicles and multiplayer networking) and the massive time savings that come with that compared to indie game dev, however it leaves you super exposed when something changes or gets updated since they’re all black box systems you have no control over.

Something needs to change because I don’t want to live in fear of an update every 2 weeks potential killing a game or project and not having any control over it or being able to fix it.

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