Epic Games has gone further than its June plan for Unreal Engine 6, and the change matters most to developers who rely on Blueprints, the engine's visual scripting system. According to Inven Global, CEO Tim Sweeney said at Unreal Fest Tokyo 2026 on November 3 that Blueprints, Actors and the C++ Gameplay Framework will all be removed from the engine, with gameplay programming moving to Epic's own Verse language.
The keynote and Epic's own pages could not be checked directly for this article, so the details below are attributed to the two outlets reporting them, Inven Global and Automaton.
From deprecated to removed
The important word here is "removed". Automaton reports that at Unreal Fest Chicago in June, Epic said Actors and Blueprints would stay in early versions of UE6 and be deprecated later, once a new framework had matured. In Tokyo, it says, Epic stated plainly that they will be taken out.
Inven Global, citing Japanese developer outlet Game Makers, says keynote slides marked all three systems as "Remove" rather than deprecated. It reports they'll be gone from the start of Early Access, which is planned for the end of 2027. Sweeney called it a "painful change" and apologized to the community, noting that many developers around the world love Blueprints, according to Inven Global. Automaton adds that the news appears to have surprised developers in Japan and abroad.
What replaces them
Inven Global reports that game logic in UE6 will be written in Verse, the language Epic has been running in Unreal Editor for Fortnite. Scenes will be built with Scene Graph, which swaps Actors for "entities" made of components, alongside new Verse Gameplay APIs. Both outlets say C++ isn't going away entirely. It stays in the engine's lower layers, while Automaton says it will no longer be usable in the gameplay framework.
Sweeney's case, per Inven Global, is that the move improves productivity and makes content easier to carry between projects. He also tied it to AI, saying AI tools have raised productivity inside Epic by 1.5 to four times in programming, debugging and level design. That's Epic's own figure, and neither report offers independent evidence for it. Automaton reads the shift as a likely step toward a UE6 designed to lean more heavily on AI-assisted development.
There's a catch on that front. Asked on X which AI models know Verse, Sweeney replied, "The currently available leading edge models saw little Verse organically during training, but that will change by January," Inven Global reports.
What happens to existing projects
Studios already building on Unreal Engine 5 aren't being pushed off a cliff. Inven Global reports that projects in production can stay on the UE5 line, and that Epic confirmed on X that Unreal Engine 5.9 will arrive in Preview next week with improved AI workflows, web as a target platform, and rendering and animation updates.
For teams that do plan to move, Epic will offer AI-assisted tools to convert Blueprints and C++ gameplay code to Verse, though their format hasn't been decided. Epic is going first with Fortnite: Inven Global says the game is moving thousands of Blueprints and its remaining C++ gameplay code to Verse. Epic Games Japan head Takayuki Kawasaki urged developers curious about UE6 to try Verse and Scene Graph in UEFN first.
Players won't feel any of this soon. UE6 Early Access isn't planned until the end of 2027, and the reports describe a change to how games get built, not to anything already on sale.
Mason's take: Blueprints let designers and artists build real gameplay without being traditional programmers, which is why this strikes me as a bigger gamble than a routine engine migration. Maybe Verse plus AI tooling fills the gap. But that's a bet on converters whose format isn't settled yet, and I'd want to see them work on a messy, real production before calling this a win.
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