All of the above still stands for me.
In addition, I’ve now spent some significant time more fully re-implementing a complex MP Unity application in UE5. One thing that stands out to me, now that I’ve had some serious time with creating a real MP application is that Unreal’s native feature set reminds me a bit of that old commercial for Ragu sauce. “It’s in there!”
Yes, it’s a bit daunting in terms of tackling a full application as opposed to just futzing around with one of the templates, but “no pain, no gain” really applies here.
There’s a pretty big hump in the Unreal learning road, the part that once you are over, the light goes on and you really grasp how the foundational elements are connected. There truly are many interdependencies, and following the trail of breadcrumbs when solving problems truly can be a pain at first.
But once you’re over that hump and start gaining the skills to understand and trace all those UE content, code and blueprints interdependencies, things start really happening.
Another discovery is that, more often than not, there would be some “difficult” thing that I wanted to do, but the method wasn’t immediately obvious.
With Unity, I would typically discover that, no, you can’t do this thing natively at all. Welp, time to write a new framework.
But with Unreal, I will often pick at the problem from different angles, do a lot of reading, internet searches and whatnot. Then, the “aha” moment happens, where I see the Unreal pieces to solve my puzzle are already there, and I just need to put them together the right way to get my desired outcome, maybe with some C++ glue to make it more clean and easy.
There’s that initial Unreal honeymoon experience where you’re doing some cool things, but mostly in the context of a template or sample project. Then comes the wall, where it feels daunting to progress because you start hitting that AAA engine complexity. But power past that wall, stick with it, and you’ll find yourself getting in a groove, cranking out and integrating significant features and polish in shorter and shorter amounts of time.
That’s been my experience, YMMV.