This will be one hell of a transition for everyone that prefers to work with Blueprint over code, like me.
So, what do we think about this?
I personally would prefer to use SceneGraph+Blueprint over SceneGraph+Verse, since I am already doing the very same thing that SceneGraph will implement anyway, within current limitations of course.
At least give us a visual way to code Verse, as replacement for Blueprint?
I really gave it a go and spent around 2 weeks in UEFN trying to learn it, and it was genuinely one of the most apalling experiences in the last 15 years of game dev (just behind trying to recompile code for Mac)
Iāve spent the last 10 years learning blueprints, and now theyāre throwing it away so we have the āopportunityā to publish on fortnite? Yeah that seems a little crappy to everybody but high level executives.
Would immediately trade Blueprint for that functionality, since I dont care about Fortnite, not even remotely.
I meanā¦ I can always just stick with UE5 or early versions of UE6 - but if Blueprint is already in early versions of UE6, as they announced, then why remove it?
Realistically right now the UE indie development ecosystem is being propped up by over a decade of material from as far back as UE4. Right now they are proposing basically throwing this away.
āYouāll be able to ship directly in Fortniteā
I have zero desire for this. Serious developers are not looking for a Roblox alternative.
āwhile we arenāt currently planning another official UE5 release after 5.8ā
This is quite alarming. UE5 is not finished. The 5.8 preview still has major issues and the experimental PVE is not done.
Weāre moving the gameplay programmingmodel to Verse
Overall very depressing update. I think if Blueprint goes away and they double-down on Fortnite and Verse, it will be time for serious devs to move to another engine. I guess weāll see, but a full transition to C#/C++ makes more sense to me than learning Verse.
Its even worse - this would mean a āclear cutā between 4/5 and 6, effectively making a decade of tutorials useless for anyone trying to learn UE6.
In the past you could use UE4 tutorials for UE5 just fine, with some adaptions because a button might have moved a bit etc. - this will be impossible for UE6, its all back to zero.
The current fortnite tutorials probably also wont cover the reality of a 2028 UE6 with all the features that probably never were exposed to UEFN for a variety of reasons.
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This throws back the entire āUnreal Engine Ecosystemā back by, at least half a decade if we assume that early ue4 stuff isnt valid today anymore.
The one thing that UE excelled on: that you could just look stuff up on youtube ā gone.
I meanā¦ I will figure out, but any newcomerā¦ very hostile environment for a few years.
Weāre building development pipeline features such as an MCP with integrations for Claude, Gemini, and others, as creativity and productivity multipliers
Itās not AI slop, itās a creativity multiplier
Blueprints was THE reason why i got into this engine instead of other enginesā¦ This will definitely eliminate a lot of newcomersā¦ Really sad that they are going down this route instead of making blueprints better especially since I still, after all this years, think blueprints is better than c++ for lots of reasonsā¦
^^ Yes exactly. It is a good on-ramp for newcomers.
For me, a shift to only C++ would make more sense than learning Verse. If I am faced with either switching to Verse or C#/C++, I am not sure why I would learn their special proprietary metaverse language when these other languages are more transferable skills.
Considering they are a business and they make a lot of money on people who are using the blueprinting to develop games, it baffles me to hear 6 will discontinue the use of BP. As Byteparrot said, its the reason I got into the development of games. I could learn the required use of C## to build a game engine when Im swapping to a custom system, but then thats a whole new road of understanding. Im not understanding why fortnite even still has players. Its boring.
What a huge shame. Even as a programmer, I quite like blueprints. Iāve found them especially nice for prototyping or making things more designer-accessable.
If there was a really good reason for it, then it is what it is, but it seems super short-sighted if the reason is just broadly ābecause Fortniteā.
As a C++ developer, if I wanted to write some fancy words for mechanics, I would go with C++.
I like blueprints because after creating my tools with codes, I can create design variations with BPs and designers can use them.
Also I donāt think coding (with a scripting language or not) is good for animations, UMG design and particles.
Besides, UE5ās third party libraries are really old. They should focus on that before metaverse-ish efforts.
As an industrial simulation developer, I donāt really care about Fortnite.
If they donāt update current libraries and offer some advantages for non-fortnite use cases, I will probably go with O3DE, Flax Engine or stick with UE5.8
Getting rid of BP is a catastrophically crap ideaā¦ they spend all this time modding the engine ( without really working on efficiency ) to on-board loads of creators, only to cut them off at the last second. Nobody wants to develop for film/TV in a fortnite engineā¦
Creatives donāt want to code. ( thatās a big full stop there )
EDIT: After a bit more reading, I see Epic are thinking of Visual-Verse?
Iāve spent five years learning Blueprints, and like tens of thousands of other people, Iām now making my own game. Working with traditional code is difficult for me, so visual scripting has been a real lifeline.
Iāll probably release my game in a year or two, and thereās a high chance I wonāt earn much from it. My plan was that after that, I could look for a job as a technical game designer on a UE project and actually be useful there.
But now it feels like, in two or three years, the standard may change and all studios will start moving to UE6, where Iāll basically become a junior again.
Iām panicking right now, and I really regret not learning other game engines earlier instead of betting everything on Unreal Engine. Maybe this is the moment when Iāll have to switch engines and simply start from scratch.
Iāve read the link and, yes, it worries me a bit.
I work in broadcast, and want nothing to do with FN or gaming beyond what I can use in broadcast (we do sports, so things like animated players and game plays are interesting).
Like a lot of other commenters, Iāve spent 10 years learning BP; what I can and canāt do, and as a professional programmer, making up for what BP lacks by creating C++ function blueprints.
Now it seems like that will all go away. Most every professional AR/VS/XR is using UE as the backend, building custom UIs on top of UE while adding needed functionality for broadcast. I feel like these companies will need to completely rework everything theyāve done to fit a completely new paradigm.
Iām old, though. This wonāt be out until nearly 2028 (probably 2028 since 18 months from now is a long time and target dates inevitably slip), and even then it seems like the current functionality will remain (as deprecated). How many more years will it take for them to finally remove it?
That gives us time to slowly migrate to the new paradigm.
I canāt say Iām happy about it, but real growth often requires major changes. All I can suggest is that people not panic; UE 5.x will be around for a long time. We still see questions in the forums abut 4.x sometimes.
There is already quite a lot of activity on this post.