Unreal Engine 6, Blueprint, and Verse, or: Capitalism’s Unmatched Innovative Potential for New and Exciting Hellscapes | by FURIOSA 🌹 | Jun, 2026 | MediumSitemapOpen in appSign up<br>Sign in

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Unreal Engine 6, Blueprint, and Verse, or: Capitalism’s Unmatched Innovative Potential for New and Exciting Hellscapes

FURIOSA 🌹

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foreshadowing (n.) — an indication of what is to come (Merriam-Webster)Last week, Epic Games announced version 6 of their flagship Unreal Engine, one of the most popular and widely-used engines for video game development. Along with a host of other features, the flagship change is the deprecation of Unreal’s much-loved Blueprint feature and the introduction of a new programming language called Verse. We’ll get there.<br>Up front I want to make it clear that while I am a professional video game developer I do not have Unreal Engine experience — I’ve exclusively worked for studios using the Unity engine and I use Godot for personal projects. I do have friends and professional contacts who use Unreal and have spoken with them on many occasions about it, including in the lead-up to writing this piece.<br>With that out of the way, let’s talk about Blueprint: both what it is and why people like it.

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Sample Blueprint screenshot, from https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/unreal-engine/quick-start-guide-for-blueprints-visual-scripting-in-unreal-engineBlueprint is a visual scripting system: using graphical nodes and connections, a user can build custom game logic that applies to entities in the scene. Fundamentally this provides the same sort of control over a game’s behavior as any other form of scripting. Rather, the strength of Blueprint comes down to its accessibility.<br>As video games have grown larger and studios have ballooned in size, the individual roles performed by workers have become increasingly specialized. The old days of a single person writing Adventure for the Atari 2600 are long behind us, modern AAA experiences of the sort Unreal Engine is built to power have hundreds of people working on every aspect of the game. As a result designing the game has become a separate discipline from programming the game with different skillsets needed for each side of “making a game do a thing”.<br>What Blueprint enables, then, is for a designer to directly fiddle with the logic of the game without requiring them to know C++, the infamously finnicky language Unreal is built on. In my own experience in professional Unity development there is often a back-and-forth between designer and programmer iterating on a new feature, but with Blueprint that friction is reduced. Even better, Blueprint supports the creation of custom nodes, so in the event a designer wants something they can’t figure out how to build they can ask a programmer to build it for them. With Blueprint you can get the best of both worlds, rapid iteration without a need to know how to program combined with the deep control that writing C++ gives you.<br>Naturally, Unreal Engine 6 is deprecating Blueprint and replacing it with something new, Verse.

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insert dark souls boss music for SWEENEY, KEEPER OF THE FORTNITEVerse is, according to Epic, “the foundation for Epic’s future programming model”. It’s a new programming language built, according to the Book of Verse, on three fundamental principles:<br>It’s Just Code: Everything written in Verse is code, built from the same primitive constructs.<br>Just One Language: Verse uses the same constructs at compile-time and run-time.<br>Metaverse First: Verse runs in a single global simulation, called the metaverse.<br>Oh no. If you’re like me, you already have some alarm bells going off in your head. For one, writing a custom language is rarely the correct solution for any engineering problem — language design is hard, and the reason “bad” languages like C++ or PHP or [insert your least favorite language] persist is because despite having deep problems they still do something better than the alternative. Something much bigger stood out to me from this initial section, though: Verse is code. In other words, Verse is not visual scripting, and it does not replace Blueprint. It’s doing a different thing, and if you work at a studio that relies on Blueprint to bridge the designer/programmer gap, too bad. Your designers need to learn Verse now.<br>Alright, but one of Epic’s stated goals for Verse is for it to be “simple enough for first-time programmers to learn, with consistent rules and minimal special cases”, so let’s take a look at what this language actually looks like.

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this section is the most programmer section of this piece, feel free to skip it if you get overwhelmed. sorry about that.As an intro to the language Epic provides an Overview...