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James Furlererererer
@furlerer.bsky.social

Amazing article ♥️ I remember when UE4 came out with blueprints, it felt so revolutionary and special and just fun to explore. I feel so very very divorced from that optimism and curiosity with modern UE but especially this. This feels so out of touch, or just chasing Roblox UGC money or something

acfoltzer
@acfoltzer.net

as a former full-time Haskeller, this is the first I'm seeing an industry impression of Verse 😬 also your cohost theme makes me feel so wistful...

ari velazquez 🌯
@ari.velazquez.fyi

i think it's important to stress staying on older versions. people aren't going to want to appear to be supporting epic by using unreal, which is as flawed a belief as thinking using windows supports microsoft, so there's a mental hurdle for a bunch of folks to clear

ari velazquez 🌯
@ari.velazquez.fyi

well what i'm saying is there's a point that _staying on an old version_ isn't really supporting them when it's the only thing you can feasibly do. telling my mom she's actually supporting microsoft's contribution to genocide cause she doesn't know linux doesn't really make sense

David Lindsey Pittman
@dphrygian.com

I've had mixed feelings on various aspects of Unreal for A WHILE but it's also the engine I've used the most in my career (other than my own) and realistically the best choice in almost every case. This is the first time I can recall they've made a really bad misstep.

Catonator
@catonator.net

Epic really is taking everything Unreal was ever good at and lighting it on fire because...?? UE4 blew up like it did because they got rid of UnrealScript and instead let people write C++ on actors directly, and now they're removing that, to add a shittier UnrealScript and a lame Unity scene system?

Conor O'Kane
@conorokane.bsky.social

If they kept Blueprints and added C# as a scripting language they would have scooped up all the disgruntled Unity devs who need a more robust engine than Godot. Switching to a brand new scripting language inconveniences and alienates their current users AND potential new ones.

Joe Wintergreen
@joewintergreen.com

There's something called Skookumscript that was a really good one of these until Epic bought it and let it rot, very peculiar behaviour. Angelscript is another one that a ton of people swear by

Conor O'Kane
@conorokane.bsky.social

Also, if they're going all-in on AI vibe coding, Verse is a terrible choice because it has so little training data. The only people this decision benefits are Fortnite developers. It's a baffling choice.

Anders Elfgren 🏹 Tides of Revival RPG
@srekel.net

I would perhaps be a bit wary of building your company on staying on UE5 or a fork of it. Maybe you can license UE3 now but who's to say Epic (or their owners..) are going to continue licensing older versions, especially ones that are too different from the original version.

Anders Elfgren 🏹 Tides of Revival RPG
@srekel.net

Just like the Unity fuckup, you know some clever suit is inevitably going to say "Why are we supporting these old versions anyway? That's not part of the metaverse, no shareholders are going to be excited about that..." Also: Developers love contributing to FOSS. To a proprietary engine...?

Mhaan
@mlhaan.bsky.social

I liked it, I don't think you were unjust in any way, and I think anger is perfectly justified. I worked on UE4 for a while, game artist around 2015-2020, moved away into more general art since. Reading publications post Swiney's brainfarts enrages me to no end, I appreciate seeing I'm not alone.

Ackart
@ackart.bsky.social

“There are not other good engines out there” (that do what UE does) still rings true and damn it hurts today

Ludovic Chabant
@ludovic.chabant.com

Good stuff! Some personal opinions: 1) IMO removing Blueprints isn't bad per se. There are great advantages to moving back to a pure text scripting language. But what sucks is that Verse is designed around crazy bullshit metaverse concepts which won't fit AAA gamedev or other customers (film, etc.)

Ludovic Chabant
@ludovic.chabant.com

Of course there are no advantages to getting rid of it. But I'm sure that's what people also said when UE4 killed most of UE3's scripting tech. The difference is that UE4's Blueprints were arguably better, and so it turned out OK.

Joe Wintergreen
@joewintergreen.com

I don't think most people did say that. Unrealscript was very cool imo, I think it's sort of a shame Blueprint wasn't basically a visual layer on top of Unrealscript. That's where they shoulda gone instead of Verse

Ludovic Chabant
@ludovic.chabant.com

2) While at Epic, complaining about all this, I asked if we'd offer UE5 long term support for customers hanging back, or if we'd make sure Verse could fulfill all/most UE5 use cases by, say, shipping a non-UEFN UE6 AAA game (maybe with a studio partner). Official reply to both was: "we don't know".

Ludovic Chabant
@ludovic.chabant.com

3) In your history of UE, you could add a step that most people may not know, that was the start of the slippery slope AFAIC: the UE team stopped working in their own P4 stream (with FN taking updates as a "customer") and moved into FN's stream. (and in a pure dev management way, IMO it was dumb)