Epic Games now plans to remove Actors, Blueprints and the C++ Gameplay Framework from Unreal Engine 6 outright rather than deprecate them, Japanese developer site Game Makers reported from Unreal Fest Tokyo 2026 on November 3. According to Game Makers, the keynote showed all three labeled "Remove," and CEO Tim Sweeney addressed the change there and at a joint press briefing; Inven Global carried the story in English.
All gameplay code moves to Verse, the scripting language already used in Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN). Actors give way to Scene Graph, which builds scenes from entities that hold components. Building through MCP and Python becomes standard, while C++ stays for engine internals like rendering and physics, Game Makers reports.
Epic's June 22 blog post, "The road to Unreal Engine 6," had said Actors and Blueprints would stay in early UE6 releases and be deprecated later. Game Makers quotes Sweeney calling the reversal "a painful change" (our translation of the site's Japanese) and says he apologized to the many developers who rely on Blueprints. Fortnite is already converting thousands of Blueprints and leftover C++ gameplay code to Verse, the site adds.
Epic's stated reason is AI: in the keynote, it claimed AI had made its own teams 1.5 to 4 times more productive at programming, debugging and level design. It plans AI-assisted conversion from Blueprints and C++ to Verse but hadn't said how that will be delivered. On X the same day, Sweeney wrote that today's leading models "saw little Verse organically during training, but that will change by January," and told one developer that teams can use any model, or none.
Why it matters: Blueprints let many solo developers and small teams build gameplay without writing code. With Verse as the only gameplay language, upgrading an existing project to UE6 will hinge on how well Epic's AI conversion works, and on who covers the AI bill, a question developer AK (@andkalysh) put to Epic on X.
Caveat: The removal plan comes from Game Makers' reports of the keynote and briefing; Epic hasn't put it in writing. The productivity figures are Epic's own internal claims, which we can't check.
UE5 projects can stay on the UE5 line, Game Makers reports, and Epic said on X on November 3 that Unreal Engine 5.9 reaches Preview the following week, with improved AI workflows. UE6 Early Access remains targeted for the end of 2027.
