They want to remove Blueprint in UE6

Development Programming & Scripting Blueprint
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Rarely use forums but signed in to voice my opposition to the complete removal of BP or some other Verse based visual scripting from UE6. I have released one Indiecade winning game in Unity in C#, and will soon be releasing a second one made in Unreal. The ease and power of BP for someone not trained as a programmer was a major reason for switching.

I am also a tenured professor teaching game design in a flagship school in the Northeast US, and I recently taught an entire course on Unreal BP. It convinced many students to switch from Unity on their senior projects, and demonstrated how quickly it lets talented creators adapt to the engine.

An Unreal which abandoned visual scripting entirely, especially with the hopes of replacing it with shoddy AI tools, would be one I would seriously consider abandoning, both as a creator and a teacher.

Please reconsider and allow the flourishing BPs have allowed to continue.

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Iā€™ve enjoyed using Unreal for almost three years now and I love using Blueprint. To me it seems to be a curious decision to sell indie developers on the benefits of Unreal Engine and then make this move. I truly wonder how relevant merging UEFN into UE and allowing us ā€œto ship directly in Fortniteā€ is to indie developers. Itā€™s concerning how much Fortnite was positioned in this announcement.

ā€œā€¦ship directly in Fortnite, or ship to your own ecosystem, and optionally, make it compatible with ours. Youā€™ll have an easy path from one to another.ā€

Is this a concern for many developers? How many developers who use UE are even doing anything with Fortnite? Iā€™m not sure Iā€™ve ever see a dev in the indie space who wanted to integrate their ā€œecosystemā€ into Fortnite. To me, itā€™s not simply a matter of it being unneeded, but itā€™s telling me that Iā€™m not really the right developer for this engine.

Moving on;

ā€œWeā€™re moving the gameplay programming model to Verse, which transactionalizes C++, for increased accessibility of development and so that we can build persistent, large-scale, live experiences with thousands of contributors.ā€

Making persistent, large-scale, live service games is not the reason I learned Unreal Engine. Again, I feel like itā€™s another tell that maybe this engine isnā€™t for indies or small teams. I donā€™t expect that these studios provide any meaningful revenue to Epic but it is disheartening to see.

I think we are all grateful for Fortnite being a living example of UE5 working at scale and Iā€™m sure it makes plenty of sense in a variety of dimensions I canā€™t imagine to more tightly integrate it into future versions of Unreal. But it certainly does read as a move to benefit Epic Games themselves more than a certain cohort of developers who use it.

More;

ā€œStudios shipping on UE5 today should expect a manageable, and clear path forward when UE6 is ready for them. To allow for this, Actors and Blueprints will be in early versions of UE6. Eventually, these will be deprecated when the new framework is sufficiently mature, and youā€™ll have conversion tools to move projects from one framework to the other.ā€

Iā€™m sure I have less programming and engine design knowledge than most of you here but this seems like a huge change. I could see if Unreal 6 used the new framework from the jump, but the conversion scares me. Iā€™m glad to hear that at some point we can expect a clear path forward but it leaves me with some questions.

-If Blueprint is removed, can we expect other graph based editors will stay?

-Will we be given sufficient notice so we can onboard ourselves with Verse?

-Do you expect that Blueprint users will hue to Verse at or near the same fluency in a reasonable amount of time?

-Do we expect some systems will not convert properly?

-What about third-party plug-in?

-How will assets purchased on Fab play into this?

Further;

ā€œOur goal is to give the games industry a whole new way to grow our ecosystems with cross-promotion, portable player value, and to really lean into all of the positive-sum dynamics that Metcalfeā€™s Law predicts for connecting experiences and social graphs together.ā€

The oddly clinical framing aside, I think a significant portion of Unreal developers are not interested in opportunities for cross-promotion and portable player value.

Epic Games, you have created an extraordinary engine that is capable of being used to create meaningful, memorable and (yes, Iā€™m saying it) unreal experiences across a variety of mediums. Please donā€™t put off more solo developers or small teams from taking advantage of these tools by posturing Unreal Engine as a Fortnite-adjacent system meant for large scale, persistent worlds. Consider what some of us are saying here in this thread.

All of this said, Unreal Engine 5 isnā€™t going anywhere. Blueprint is still usable. The community is still as helpful and resourceful as ever. And I think a lot of people are not unwilling to make changes or learn new tools and workflows if the benefits are clear (as Epic seems to believe). Itā€™s important to be adaptable and not be married to a tool or workflow.

I donā€™t think this is as apocalyptic as some of the more hyperbolic takes seem to indicate. I just hope Epic doesnā€™t forget the solo and small developers that use Unreal to bring our visions to life. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Its because people are ā€œshockedā€ at first.

Just wait until they notice that UE6 (apparently) will mess up everything regarding XYZ coordinates too - go and launch UEFN, say bye to your ā€œX:Front, Y:Right, Z:Upā€.

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There HAS to be a visual scripting alternative for Verse. How could Epic possibly promote Expedition 33 as a huge success story and yet remove visual scripting, when the entire success of Expedition 33 was the ability for non-programmers to easily contribute through visual scripting. Does Epic really believe everyone should just learn text-based scripting and LLMs??? And then when thereā€™s a weird problem or the LLM spits out weird code, itā€™s all up to engineers to fix the problem? I cannot believe Epic thought it was a good idea to remove visual scripting when itā€™s one of the biggest reasons why UE5 succeeded.

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Apparently - its some kind of trend with the big companies, and epic always has been riding trends.

cough Metaverse cough (If I had to guess why Metahumans are called Metahumansā€¦ thats why - which then was succeeded by ā€œmegaā€.)

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I think thatā€™s useless. I guess the reason for removing BP is that the new scene graph isnā€™t compatible with BP. BP works with the actor framework, which will be removed once the Scene Graph framework is mature.

Actually, I prefer the Scene Graph to the Actor framework ā€” itā€™s the most significant framework change since UE3, I think.

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This is the reason why they change from X/Y/Z FRU setup to LUF

https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/we-re-moving-to-the-left-up-forward-luf-coordinate-system/2540901

https://x.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1930678660098408669

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UE6 becomes more and more uninteresting by the day.

Will just stick with 5 for a decade and then stop making stuff, its all gonna be AI slop by then anyway.

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I really dont care about deploying to Fortniteā€¦ I dont want to ā€œRobloxifyā€ my game, I chose this engine because of Blueprints and c++, now BP are dissapearing and Verse is taking the main role of c++? Also the Verse syntax somehow, eventho its a more recent language, looks absolutely horrible.

This years state of Unreal was more of a live massacre of Unreal Engine lol

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Like I say, last time I saw context with indentation, it was FORTRAN :person_facepalming:

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I am absolutely demotivated to work on Unreal Engine game project after this state of unreal, i dont care about Fortnite, i dont care about a programming language which syntax is horrible and looks like PROLOG built for ā€œmetaverseā€, the closest thing we have to a metaverse right now is VRchat, and thats just 12 year olds saying slurs and degenerates.

As a software engineer for years, i refuse to learn a random language built for this ā€œmetaverseā€ concept which is basically VRChat+Roblox/fortnite with AI generated slop games where you lose interest in any game after 2 minutes because they are as shallow as a puddle, but thats OK! Since theres so much slop to choose from!

Thanks Epic, now i can focus on other things instead of being a game dev, since i can just prompt a new game into existance if i wanted to later on, just dont forget to add ā€œDont make any mistakesā€.

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LLMs are a massive grey sludge averaging of everything that has come before. So it canā€™t do anything newā€¦

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I meanā€¦ :rofl: ā€¦hear me out: Just like it is with AAA games today.

Eventually they even will replace the art and rendering with AI, as the demo they have shown implicates. (the only thing currently missing, is the ability to do that at 60fps with temporal stability and good quality - but thats a hardware issue.)

Blueprint dying is only the first step, the beginning.

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Hey, they could use AI players too ( especially if itā€™s MMO ), then we can all step out of the picture :smiley:

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DLSS 5, make every slop you generate look like sexually explicit game ads!

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can DLSS turn Verse into Blueprint, id goon to that. :sob:

Jokes aside.

I tried Verse, its much less efficient and fast to deal with than Blueprint, its just annoying.
Suddenly you need to look at typos, find the {}s and () and . and this and that and <> and dont mess up indentation etc.

I am literally (a lot) faster in BP than in Verse, even for the most basic things.

A ā€œLoopā€ I can get in less than half a second into my BP, the full setup being less than a few seconds for a simple one. (or you skip the whole thing alltogether and just dump the entire Array into whatever you want to do. (Yes, many nodes accept arrays too.))

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Iā€™ve been working with Unreal Engine for a long time, and I want to add my perspective as someone who uses Blueprint professionally and understands how to build production-ready systems with it.

I have no interest in Fortnite, UEFN, or building within that ecosystem. I chose Unreal because it is a general-purpose engine that supports different kinds of developers, projects, platforms, and workflows. The increasing push to merge the identity and architecture of Unreal Engine with UEFN feels disconnected from the needs of many developers who are simply trying to build and ship independent games and professional applications.

Moving gameplay development toward Verse also feels like a step backwards. We have already been through the model of locking gameplay logic behind a separate engine-specific language with UnrealScript and UDK. Reintroducing that kind of dependency does not feel like progress, especially when C++ and Blueprint already provide a mature and proven combination.

Blueprint is not merely a prototyping tool. It is quick and effective for prototyping, certainly, but experienced developers can also use it to build performant, reliable, maintainable, and shippable systems. I have enough knowledge of the engine to understand Blueprintā€™s costs, limitations, execution model, replication concerns, and architectural requirements. Used properly, it is just as legitimate a production tool as any programming language in the hands of a capable developer.

Replacing or deprecating it should therefore require a very strong technical justification and a clearly superior workflow. So far, what has been presented appears primarily optimized around Fortnite-scale persistent ecosystems, thousands of contributors, and Epicā€™s own platform strategy. Those may be valid goals for Epic, but they are not automatically the right goals for every Unreal developer.

The proposed AI integration does not reassure me either. It feels more like a band-aid for the additional complexity developers will inherit than a real substitute for a transparent and deterministic development workflow. When generated code or generated logic begins producing subtle runtime, replication, state, or performance issuesā€”and it inevitably willā€”troubleshooting those problems may become considerably harder. Developers will still need the underlying expertise, except now they may also have to inspect unfamiliar generated code, fight inconsistent outputs, and spend significant amounts of tokens repeatedly attempting to correct the result.

AI can assist development, but it should not be treated as a replacement for an understandable, inspectable, and directly editable programming environment.

I am not opposed to new frameworks, Scene Graph, Verse, or better tooling. I am opposed to discarding a mature and highly productive workflow before its replacement has demonstrated that it is genuinely better for the broad Unreal development community.

From what has been shown, this feels like the easiest route for consolidating Unreal and UEFNā€”not necessarily the right route for the developers who helped make Unreal Engine successful outside Fortnite.

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My $0.02:

  1. Itā€™s way too early to get upset or excited about anything. There may be a visual scripting replacement, there may not be; they may get enough push-back to change their minds - itā€™s all so far away, I donā€™t think anyone should get all bent out of shape just yet.
  2. For the professional programmers disrespecting people using BPs, Iā€™m a professional programmer for almost 40 years (yes, Iā€™m old), and one thing I learned is to do things the simplest way possible (BP) unless and until it becomes a problem, then you fall back to C++ plugins to do what you canā€™t with BPs.
  3. Unreal is now used for FAR MORE than games, and those revenue streams (like broadcast and film pre-vis) have become substantial revenue streams for EPIC. Virtually every AR/VS/XR package is now built on Unreal, and the companies they license to are in the billions of revenue and pay corresponding licensing fees. These companies prototype in BPs (and leave them there if they are working), because they have more artists than programmers, and deadlines that cannot be pushed.

We really need to voice our opinions, yes, but people threatening to give up on UE before even seeing whatā€™s coming along is being very short sighted, and so is ignoring the power of BPs.

Iā€™m kind of shrugging, for now. We can talk about new games just switching to some new paradigm, but updating all the existing broadcast, design, and scientific, and other software that has evolutions instead of complete rewrites is something else.

Iā€™m not going to worry about for the next two years or so - if it looks like what they say will pan out, I only hope there is enough resources out there for us to switch easily to verse, and hopefully still a lot of visual tools for the artists.

Ahhā€¦ Iā€™d add that sometimes things simply need big changes to advance. What that advancement is, Iā€™m not sure just yet. But even Windows has had updates (3.11 to 95, etc.) which were big disrupters, but necessary to keep up with newer hardware without slowing development. People complained, made out like the sky would fall, but here we are.

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So I am not sure I am understanding this right.

Blueprints will be deprecated and replaced with verse script? Is that the punchline?

How the backwards comp ability would be if people wrote systems with unreal 5.8+ and want to switch engine version? Would the C++ blueprint notations work or break the compilation? Will developers have to get rid of them and refactor to be able to compile? Do we have any information about it?

Also what about the many graphs in the engine, like plugin graphs, behavior trees, state trees, audio plugins, pcg, chaos will their graphs also converted?

Sounds like a crappy idea imo also what happened to

We make the engine.

ā You make it Unreal.

I didnā€™t hear dev complaints about blueprints. I do use hybrid and didnā€™t like the idea of getting rid of something entirely where it works nicely.

I work with anything, donā€™t really care too much but think introducing one more thing to learn where nobody asked for sounds like a business decision to me rather than a community decision.

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More like:

  • First they exist alongside each other (in addition to scenegraph?)
  • Then BP and Actors will be deprecated
  • then BP and Actors will be removed

but overall, yes.

robux happened, I assume, given how much epic is leaning into the robloxification of Fortnite.