They’re actually going to abandon such an easy-to-use visual scripting system? And to cater to AI, they plan to replace Blueprints with a harder-to-understand, more primitive machine language? Isn’t this a bit regressive? I think UE’s Blueprints is the best visual scripting system in the world right now. It allows all non-programmers to effortlessly make the high-quality games they want, polish them, and release them — rather than the shoddy electronic junk cranked out purely by AI. Aren’t there enough shoddy AI games already?
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I am there there with you. All the news from UE6 were appalling to me, and it feels Epic is taking a very stupid turn. It’s clearly a bunch of decisions taken by executives that are not gamers, nor game developers, and are not listening to their community.
Nobody cares about releasing in Fortnite or transforming all of gaming into a Metaverse. There are tons of different games and experiences. Nobody wants to ‘Robloxify’ all of gaming.
We love Blueprint. Blueprint is what makes Unreal the best Engine in the industry. 20 Years of making this amazing tool, and they now want to throw it away along with all the backlog of resources online, for this new language that nobody knows? Even removing C++ ?
Curious to see where this is all going, but not impressed so far.
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They made it pretty clear that this isn’t happening soon I would say prolly 4 years plus. I think the point is that most people will use at which text is better for and that is why they are switching to verse scripting language. I guess to their thinking is that by that time that AI will be good enough for the non artist to be able to use AI to get what they want and the visual method will not be needed.
Why wouldnt you want to be able to deploy your game to the fortnite-ecosystem with the most horrible syntax ever (Verse) just to cater to some kids?
Tim Sweeney has a vision new ecosystem for games, but if you read between the line’s something else becomes very clear: Epic games cannot compete with steam so they try to bypass steam all together.
I’m an game artist first and i have been learning blueprints to support my dev team with art integration. The visual scripting is the while reason i changed to unreal engine all those years ago when 4 released as i wanted to be able to create my own shaders without having to learn text based code. Visual coding is essential for me and epic game’s has always used blueprints font and centre in thier marketing when promoting why you should use thier engine. I absolutely dont care about UEFN nor do i have a desire to make games using it. so with that being said i would lose alot more then i would gain by switching to unreal engine 6.
They keep hammering on how much daily active users the fortnite ecosystem has. but any developer should know those numbers dont meen much. Steam also has an insane ammount of daily active users but a vast majority of them are spread out over the 10 most popular games so in this context those numbers dont meen much to me as a developer, and as a player i’m also just abolsutely disinterested in the fortnite ecosystem and i dont want to have anything to do with it.
Adittionally i want to add from personal experiance how epic game’s handles “depricated” features. they say it will still work, but just not be updated. this is a half truth. i want to take lightmass as an example. yes, technicall lightmass still works in 5.7 there is a BIG however attatched to this. lightmass is not compatible with the following:
- Nanite
- Lumen
- Substrate
- The GPU lightmapper is also broken in 5.7 and you have to download a community patch to make it functional.
As you can see you have to sacrifice alot to make use of this “depricated” feature and i have no reason to believe epic will do a better job supporting visual coding in the long term. With unreal engine 6,
Epic game’s is trying to solve its own player market cap problem by creating problems for the developers using thier engine. We have entered the Enshittification arc of unreal engine.
The killing of Blueprints was a tech decision based on performance in more areas than Fortnite as described in “The road to Unreal Engine 6”
The number of non-tech people that have chosen Unreal because of Blueprints is phenomenal which might make the Blueprint decision however justified from a technical point of view, into a classic business marketing mistake. Visual Artists and any visually oriented people are going to bail out on the product if their transition path is banging out Verse code in a text editor!
UE6 performance is important but having customers is important too. So there probably needs to be a new visual front end of some sort that will define Unreal for a new generation.
I understand the performance argument against Blueprint but honestly, I feel like Unreal has way more performance issues on the GPU side rather than CPU, whenever blueprint is done properly.
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It is a different type of performance issue Epic is trying to address connected to massive network scale-out
I think it’s really foolish to abandon Blueprints just so non-programmer creators can make better use of AI to write code and build things. I’ve worked at a game company for a while, and sometimes even face‑to‑face communication between designers and programmers leaves things that can’t be clearly explained. Unless AI’s comprehension is on a whole different dimension than a human’s, it’s only going to churn out electronic junk.