On Wednesday after the announcements and Road to UE6 article, I made the painful decision to transition my studio off Unreal after years of work. We’re now investigating Godot, Unity, and CryEngine. I won’t be able to recommend learning Unreal to my students anymore either, as a reliable career advantage, unless they’re working in UE6’s areas of specialty.
To my eyes on the outside, I see this as the deprecation announcement for the Unreal Engine product line and the promotion of the UEFN product line rebranded as UE6.
And the UEFN product line doesn’t fit my studio’s needs, isn’t a viable classroom tool, and isn’t a career advantage.
The UE product line had a lot to love and a lot of problems, but Blueprints made it amazing as a teaching tool and to empower semi-technical folks able to work in engine. With that gone and a language with no career path, no meaningful documentation or tutorials, and no substantive backlog of online Q&A for AI to learn from, I see no way for the UEFN-rebranded-as-UE6 product line to succeed except for filmmaking and the MMO/digital theme park/looter-shooter spaces, where it will absolutely dominate.
And it makes me very, very sad for everyone–casual creators, career pros, indies, the hardworking people at Epic who are seeing these comments right after losing 1,000 coworkers, and even leadership at all levels who are trying to do the right thing.
No one won on Wednesday. I hope we can all go back to winning again soon and I hope UE6 finds its audience and Epic finds its way through this time.
I built an AI Agent that is small enough to run on the local machine and it has become a Unreal C++ & Blueprint / Verse Specialist. All it does is Unreal coding. It is small enough to run on a basic RTX 5060 card. It is just 7 billion parameters and takes around 8GB of VRAM, nowhere near the 100 billion parameters AIs that ppl are using with subscriptions.
Hey… I do NOT pay tokens subscriptions to anyone, however I cannot share because Epic has introduced a clause to engine EULA that forbids AI agents to be trained on engine source code. If Epic ever changes route, I will gladly share the model (if it ever happens).
But… perhaps Epic is building their own LLM, I wouldn’t be surprised.
Then you will have to subscribe to their ai token fees
The failure of your argument is that not everyone that works on a game is a programmer. I assure you I don’t feel like doing code reviews on Verse PRs done by an artist.
I did. I’d still prefer it to Verse. Many successful games have been made exclusively in BP and lots more with a mix of BP so that artists/level designers can have tools for world building.
Golf It! is BP. Kine is BP. Bright Memory Infinite is BP. Tall Poppy is BP, Tower Princess is BP. The First Tree, Choo Choo Charles, Kena: Bridge of Spirits. Sea of Thieves used a lot of BP apparently although not exclusively, with some C++ (same for Valorant, same for Gears 5).
So…this idea that because BP has limitations means it has no value is just wrong and uninformed. All high level languages trade some efficiency for ease-of-use.
I get that people use Blueprints to get into programming but Holy Christ is it a garbage way to build and maintain code.
I worked at a triple A studio that had every programmers with 10+ years experience in the field work in hybrid C++ Blueprint on an upcoming title and not one of them said that.
And when you consider entire games can be built from this feature alone I don’t think it warrants your “good riddance” jester take TBFH.
I’m a programmer and I never liked Blueprints as a scripting tool, but I would never, ever, remove it from the engine. I work in the AAA industry and Blueprints are a fundamental tool for tech artists and designers.
You can’t just replace them with Verse. Verse is a full programming language, you need to be a programmer to use Verse. I would love to use Verse in the future, but I’d love it because I’m programmer, Verse is not just accessible to a tech artist or a designer, unless they spend literally years and they learn how to code.
Also Verse would never be as quick as Blueprints to prototype, you can’t beat visual scripting, and even if I don’t use Blueprints for production, it’s an awesome tool to test quickly ideas, and create prototypes.
I can’t believe Epic really thinks removing Blueprints is a good idea. I really hope they will revert their decision, and let developers use both Verse and Blueprints.
Currently planning to skip UE6 entirely, because in 10 years from now everything will be vastly different if AI progresses as quickly as it did over the last 3 years.
Like, realistically speaking:
UE6 wont be “ready” until 2030 anyway, judging by when UE5 became stable enough and the features started to become more optimized.
I expect the big studios etc. to hit Epics fingers for the removal of Blueprint, because they all have their designers do stuff with it, which is why most engines have a similar system, even in-house engines.
UE 5.7 is rather stable for me (unlike 5.8 -.-), so this is “the sweetspot” for me for years to come.
if I really have to, meh, I will somehow manage to figure out Verse in 2030+ (when its more mature and the onboarding/tutorials are better than now, but I might poke it for “learning purpose” every now and then in UE6.)
The stuff I make has almost no overlap with the Fortnite Players, so why put any effort into it to begin with.
EDIT: Was bored and did a quick dive into Verse in UEFN - its actually extremely easy if you are good at blueprint, even if you cant program yet, BUT: the tutorials are outdated, even on youtube, but ChatGPT got you covered.
Furthermore: Verse wont complain about { } being there (in functions), but it doesnt need them since all of this is done through indentation.
Interesting approach, definitely. (but without prior knowledge about Blueprint, or as beginner, things will be a lot harder than they are for me, due to “the engine knowledge” not being there.)
