The Epic choice of removing Blueprints in Unreal Engine 6 (and more doubts)

Epic has recently announced Unreal Engine 6, a new version of their game engine which is coming late 2027 in Early Access (YEP!! it's more than a year from now) and aiming to release completely after at least another year (meaning late 2028 onwards).

It is not the first time an engine shares something so early in the roadmap, e.g. Unity with their .NET CoreCLR release, or Unity 6.7 onwards (roadmap here) announced super early, but this time it feels... different?

Other than an abundantly clear focus on the metaverse, merging "Unreal Engine" with "Unreal Editor For Fortnite" and even allowing developers to have Fortnite skins in their own games... they also announced they will be removing blueprints - one of the things that made Unreal easier to work with and that many developers have used to build games almost exclusively (like the GOTY title Clair Obscur).

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95% of Clair Obscur’s gameplay systems were built from Unreal Blueprints, says Sandfall Interactive

Polygon.comGiovanni Colantonio

Verse, the programming language

They [Epic] will use their "new" programming language called Verse (actually already in the Editor for Fortnite version), where they say:

It’s a next-generation programming language purpose-built to power massive, persistent game worlds at scale, where global state just works, and transactionally correct concurrency is handled by the runtime

The fact that you write code and the engine automatically handles networking, massive scale distribution, rewind and much more is crazy, and coming from their Fortnite experience of live concerts with millions of concurrent players... they're the only ones who can pull this off at this scale.

That said - I have hoped that Verse being closer to python/C# would have made things easier compared to C++ (especially removing blueprints)... but I have read some code from their best practices in UEFN and I am not so sure about it:

GetRandomPlayerToEliminate()<decides><transacts>:player=
          Player := FindRandomPlayer[]
          IsAlive[Player]
          not IsInvulnerable[Player]
          Character := Player.GetFortCharacter[]
          Character.GetHealth < 10
          Player
      if (Player := GetRandomPlayerToEliminate[]):
          Eliminate(Player)

Anyways. The technical goals sound promising and I am sure the ecosystem will improve over time.

But...

Removing Blueprints

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 you’ll have conversion tools to move projects from one framework to the other.

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And it’s “twice as fast”

Nintendo LifeNintendo Life

I am not so sure about this specific part. It's definitely a bold move and I give them recognition for that - given that the easy path Today is to be risk-adverse and a change like they did is not that.

On the other hand though.. wasn't the whole point of Blueprints the fact that they helped make coding (and Unreal in this case) much much more accessible?

So many questions...

This leaves me with so many questions (and we're not even mentioning AI in this post).

What will students think when they will be learning Unreal during this migration, knowing that Blueprints and actors will go away?

And how long will this migration take? Will projects that ship on 5.8 be stuck on that version for a while and how is the long term support for this planned from Epic?

Will the integration between different game skins and worlds be a good or bad thing for developers and players? Will this make these games feel more like a catalog to hop in during a trend (Roblox Style), concentrating the top performers even more in the upper %, or will it actually incentivise players to discover and stick with something new?

And won't things just look the same? (If we can share the same skins etc.)

Overall... only time will tell if change will draw people towards or away from the engine. Maybe in N months Epic will change their mind and release a new verse blueprint-like and half of the worries will go away. Or the game/infrastructure will work so well that all these doubts will sound ridiculous... but as of now.. these are my perplexities.

Game dev is hard and tech is hard... I'm curious to see where things go!

Ciao!