After hearing the news about the major changes in UE6, I'm convinced we are experiencing the beginning of a "cursed" version of the engine. Everything seems like UE6 will drop as the Windows 8 by Microsoft - an experimental version which never was good.
Today I will share my thoughts about all of this.
Removing the joystick from the gamepad
"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."
Source
Blueprints are one of the main pillars of Unreal Engine, a built-in tool which serves programming logic and saves lot of time to designers, artists and programmers. Unreal Engine stands out because of this: highly technical, powerful... BUT accessible. Including the recent UE5 technology being developed and released during the past years, this software is now at the top of the game engines used by game developers. From indies and small teams to huge companies.
But now, Blueprints will be gone eventually on UE6 with no available alternatives. So they are removing the joystick from the gamepad.
Upgrade, improve, but never remove.
Unreal Engine is not Fortnite
"Over the next two years, we'll be unifying the two major streams of Unreal Engine development—UE5 and Unreal Editor for Fortnite—into a single product: Unreal Engine 6."
It seems like Epic Games are forgetting what Unreal Engine really is. They are mixing the border between the engine and the game. They develop their engine for their games which is great, but they also share their engine as a public tool. By removing Blueprints and switching to Verse, they are converting the engine into something they want, but nobody asked for.
They have Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) already and I think both branches should be kept separated. But they did not, so Unreal Engine 6 is becoming their personal experimental tool instead, just for Fortnite and indie kamikaze heroes who wants to go deep inside a custom technology like Verse which is not warranted to be continued nor required from other projects needs.
They want for everyone who uses UE to switch, learn and fit into their custom tech for their custom needs. This is not the right way to keep a valuable tool running in the market.
Let's be honest here: Epic Games can easily develop a Visual Scripting feature for Verse. They have time, money and resources. But making a Visual Scripting tool is no longer an option for them.
"We’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."
Removing Visual Scripting is not what we call "increased accessibility" compared to UE4/5.
Ecosystem breach and decline
The entire ecosystem of Unreal Engine 4 and 5 includes millions of tutorials, documentation, videos, guides and forums which will become completely outdated even as a simple learning reference for UE6. This will create a knowledge void and a harder learning curve from scratch to learn the "same" engine. This will force many devs to stay on UE4/5, huge amount of markeplace incompatible content, training cost and production time, million-dollar losses in both Epic Games / third parties and client drop ratio eventually.
AI is artificial, not intelligent
The use of AI is oversaturated nowadays. Verse language from Unreal Engine 6 is linked to AI assistance tools, which are optional (thankfully) but they better make an optimized engine first rather than implementing AI and switching to a new language.
On the other hand, we cannot rely on AI generative logic to build a game. Developers needs to know what they are building. Giving away AI assistance tools requires also a good use of them: you can use it eventually, but not always for everything. Developers who understand logic are capable of creating a game without AI, even those who are non-programmers. AI should be a side tool feature, not something to settle your engine on. Same goes with cloud-based tools.
Faster is not better
There are two different approaches about what "faster" really is. Here we enter into an unstable terrain where words like "fast" and "optimized" are completely mixed: you can produce content quickly while increasing maintenance costs and instability, or you can do your job in the most optimized way possible but also taking your time to make things consistent. The best balance is met between resources optimization and workflow adaptation. Speed matters, but not at the expense of stability and long-term efficiency.
Bigger worlds (even more empty)
We (players and creators) don't need bigger worlds - we need living ones. Bringing life to an original creation doesn't requires space but time.
Content is done to be consumed. Art is created to be felt.
The big deal is to find some balance between artists (who enjoy taking their time while creating) and investors (who hates to wait and expects money asap). It's quite simple from the outside: let artists cook and the product will have a very good quality. +quality = +money. But greed and impatience makes people to take the worst decisions at the worst times without taking the required attention to the environment for the people around. UE6 development flow is a good example of this. Things will be fine once we all can handle both time and patience.
I better be wrong
To conclude this post, I really hope that nothing bad happens to Unreal Engine and its creative environment. I rather be wrong and UE6 drops as a fresh accessible engine, or maybe Epic Games rethinks some decisions. Unreal Engine is a tool that allowed many people to make their dream game to come true, and it's sad to hear news about how they remove accessibility.
We don't fear changes, we fear those who try to reinvent the wheel.
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