I too find myself here with many doubts about UE6.
Especially as teacher I find myself in a bad situation right now because Verse practically doesn’t exist yet but Blueprint is already known to be removed.
I teach game and narrative design classes and I already see a lot of difficulty teaching non-programmers how to code in blueprints but with verse I think it’s almost impossible.
I think it’s important to make Epic understand our point of view, and maybe they still have room to maneuver to change something in time.
yeah im worried as well. I have spent so much time in unreal, im dyslexic and despite trying to code it just dosent work looking at a sea of text. I just dont know what to do, unreal has been amazing and a big part of my life. I dont want to switch engines, but its somthing thats on my mind
No idea why they needed to “prototype different things” at epic, when we have “the thing” that has worked fine since UE3 kinda, even though it was called kismet back then.
Instead of just keeping Blueprint with Verse “behind the nodes”.
It doesnt even go against the approach that they use for SceneGraph, they can keep that, but we “code” the components with Verseprint.
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Realistically speaking though - we can just skip UE6 entirely, because why do “that transition” if we can just vibe along with UE5 and the stuff that we are used to while we wait and see what happens with UE7.
We should at least be fine until 2040ish with UE5, and by then… the world of making games will look completely different due to the Ensloppification of everything.
Why put the effort into something that will be obsolete by then anyway, from our perspective.
Epic isnt “wrong”, but I think its way too early to deprecate BP and Actors, given how far away we are from “that future”.
This was a shocker for me. I got to this post because I googled immediately when watching the reveal recording…like, what…?! Seriously!? They dropped that ‘deprecated’ comment in there like they were talking about moving a UI button. The hopeful side of me wants to believe that, while they’re eventually getting rid of the Actor-BP framework, they’re not abandoning their HUGE base of visual coders, and that they’ll replace BP visual scripting with something new.
I teach both UE and UEFN for architectural simulation, and while I can teach my architecture students (who have never programmed before) BP scripting in my UE class, there’s no way in hell I can teach them Verse in my UEFN class. IMHO, It’s a completely non-beginner-friendly language. Even with Developer Assistant, I can’t teach them to vibe code in verse, as there’s no way for them to read and interpret the results, given their lack of programming experience. I briefly tested the assistant to see if I could integrate it into my course, and it did a pretty solid job making basic devices and providing instructions for implementation. But it still required my programming knowledge and experience with game dev platforms to implement meaningfully.
I think without replacing BVS with a new visual scripting language, this is HUGE mistake for Epic.
I love Blueprints. I jumped into UE4 with it. Eventually mostly switched to C++, but still love BPs.
Saying that, from pragmatical reasons, BPs are outdated. Epics were one of the main evangelists of the node-driven visual programmin approach in general, amd that approach is great in a lot of cases.
But for code specifically, it bears tons of problems, starting with as simple as version control and reviewing the changes. It’s just SO MUCH easier to do with text-based code, that for this reason alon I would drop BPs immediately if there was another tool similar by availability and overall usage.
C++ have a serious cons such as very slow iterations loop during development, even with respect to hot reloade/live coding.
But with Verse, it should have nbest of two worlds - fast iterations AND easy to diff. And there are tons of other features in Verse…
So despite my love for Blueprints, I don’t see any reason to keep them. I really love that Epics won’t keep the legacy just because of nostalgic feelings, that is the only good way to move tech forward.
Idk… indies having to pay for hundreds of thousands of tokens to do basic stuff, thats a valid reason I would argue?
And even if they do, they dont know how to debug the stuff the AI did, its a blackbox to them. If players find bugs in the game, the “developers” (sloppers) wont know anything about their “own” (not really anymore, its the AIs game) game.
No internet? No vibe-coding, because you need to use the big Models for that.
So, Epic is forcing those people into dependency of the big AI companies, into ecosystems outside of Epics own.
It will lead to buggier games, at lower quality, at higher costs to make.
Exactly, I spent over a year developing an audio system that uses blueprints for the marketplace, I don’t know how to code, they’re killing my product unless I can find a way to convert it and learn how to maintain it with code. Just glad it’s going to take a few years to come in, but it sucks.. I’ve just been reading comments on YouTube, so many people are affected by this.
Based on the presentation, why would anyone use UE6 over UE5.8 at this point?
From the announcement it doesn’t look like 6 can do anything the 5.8 can’t, you lose access to around 100,000 assets and plugins, it will be more difficult to work with and the potential bandaid of using an LLM just means mandatory internet connection and a very expensive token subscription (given the iterative process of coding).
It kinda impressive how this is the exact opposite of UE5 which was all about ease of use - no light bakes, no LOD making, PCG helps out with massive levels, LWC support and all of your workflows remain the same.
I’ve been a programmer for several unreal and non unreal engine game, and now lead programming engineer on an UE5 project. I work almost exclusively in C++ but have always found BP exposure a great last 10% iteration tool to get things just right. They’re also fantastic for artists and level designers.
I’ve also stood by Epic for the fantastic tools they offer you with no upfront cost. The royalty is completely fair. The pipeline is great as of 5.7.4 (haven’t downloaded 5.8 yet, will wait for a few fixes). Planning to remove such a powerful flagship feature like blueprints is astonishing. I’m willing to wait for more official clarity before dooming too much about it. I’m all in favor of improving legacy systems. Changing the Actor framework to be less based on inheritance and more on composition would be a great start. So I welcome some of the proposed changes, certainly to networking.
Verse is not something I’m interested in at all. If you’re going to introduce a new way to script or program that is higher level than C++, why on earth would you not use one of the many mature languages that could do the job? Instead you choose a language that is essentially Unreal-specific? How about using something battle tested like C#, Python, Lua? There’s decades of tooling available for those languages.
You guys probably need to reel this one, or explain it better, or you’re going to get the Unity treatment.
The whole draw of UE4 and 5 was the ability to do both high end C++ and basic blueprinting to allow more people to collaborate and be involved. This is just throwing that out so that they can shove AI vibe-coding down everyone’s throats using up a metric ton of tokens and water.
I suspect most people whom are against the removal of BPs never built something complex enough with them to start see the core issues.
It’s either C++ folks who just use them as interface with with UE’s asset/content system or for a few fine tuning scripts, or people who do just small isolated part of the whole game development workload, or beginners.
But it always ends up in one of the two ways:
You don’t use BPs exclusively, in which case you constantly have to make a decision between using a language that’s either too high level for the job or too level for the job, and make this decision for every single feature you add.
You do use BPs exclusively, in which case you are getting more and more friction as the project complexity and BP class interconnections grow, to the point where every larger refactor feels extremely tedious, risky, and bug prone because it’s very hard to fix up all the rippling changes that come from changing core layout and functionality of BP classes.
Some people sometimes talk about this mythical perfect scenario where you use C++ for low level, high performance “LEGO blocks” and use BPs for high level assembly of these blocks, but I’ve never ever seen that working in practice. They always throw around empty phrases like “Use the right tool for the job” but having BP and C++ to make a game feels like having a hammer and a wrench to screw in a phillips head screw.
The way it usually ends up is that people prototype something in BPs with amazing iteration speed, but then have to bite the bullet and rewrite the whole thing down to C++ for better performance and access to lower level engine features. That effectively means doing the whole work twice. Angelscript is a great proof/example that it doesn’t have to be that way.
I really envy the Unity or Godot folks for not having to deal with it, and just start with something like C# and finish and ship the project still with C#. No multi-phase prototype in BP and ship in C++ dance.
And I do agree that Verse is a very risky gamble, in comparison to something like widespread and ergonomic C#.
I went and built a (proper) factorio-logic with it, with millions of moving objects etc. without offloading to Task Graph.
Blueprint is incredible and extremely powerful if you also know about the tech in UE5 etc. to pull something like this off. (It also helps to have an understanding of how hardware works, to not run into issues that tutorials often dont even talk about, or the people making those know about.)
There are things Blueprint isnt well suited for, I agree, but for like 90% of the stuff needed (on indie and even AA level), it is. Just like with programming, the result depends on the capabilities of the user in front of the engine.
There are issues with BP, but also ways to work around it.
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If anything, epic should focus on fixing the “engine fighting itself”, because the new Features (nanite for example) are way more powerful than the engine tells you they are, because things from the past become issues and crash performance. (I, I know about this, and just like it is with blueprint: deal with it.)
Blueprint is the least of the issues with UE5/6, imho.
Why do they think most people care to develop for a fortnite ecosystem?
Games are supposed to be original, like any art. Why weigh us down with this crap and on top making us re-adapt.
If they ditch blueprints I can’t imagine what will happen to material editor, niagara etc…
What is Epic doing? I can’t believe what I saw out of that conference. Now I’m learning that they plan to cut Blueprints? What? They have to reverse course on all of this. So many strange choices right on top of each other. I’ll stay on 5.8 and just not use the AI nonsense.
Several people well said about the limitations on BP and why so many developers trying to stay away from BP. Yeah BP is great in many ways but the few limitations is the absolute deal breakers. I absolutely agree with Epic the direction they are heading. It’s just that we don’t have enough information yet. I believe they will provide something that can replace BP with a new toolset. And they specifically mentioned it. They won’t drop until the new toolset is mature enough. Let’s wait and see what they have to provide. If you cannot absolutely cannot accept, you can still use UE5 or UE4. UE4 is still very capable engine if you don’t need the latest tech.
My grunt is, Epic don’t share much information along the way. For example, it’s very difficult to understand why Verse is designed the way it is designed. At the first glance, it seems like they reverted convention for no clear reasons and it’s the most verbose language I’ve ever seen, yet they say it’s easy to learn for beginners. I’m probably becoming too old. If they can share why they made such choices instead of just throwing at us, I would appreciate it more but for now, I absolutely hate the way it looks. It’s probably meant to be read and written by a machine, like html, or they are trying to cut corners for the parser.
Anyway, my take is that Epic will not drop visual scripting but they are working hard how to replace BP. When they do, we can just toggle between Verse and Visual Verse and you can choose the preferred mode to work on. This will make everyone happy, no?
