At Unreal Fest Tokyo, Epic said Actors, Blueprints and the C++ Gameplay Framework will be removed in Unreal Engine 6, not just phased out. Tim Sweeney called it a painful change and apologized to developers.
Epic Games has confirmed that Unreal Engine 6 will remove three of the biggest building blocks game developers use today: Actors, Blueprints, and the C++ Gameplay Framework. The news came out of the Unreal Fest Tokyo 2026 keynote and a joint press briefing with Epic CEO Tim Sweeney on Tuesday, November 3 in Ariake, Tokyo, as reported by Japanese developer outlets Game Makers and IndieGamesJp.dev. Gameplay programming in UE6 moves to Epic’s own Verse language instead.
What you need to know
- What’s being removed: Actors, Blueprints (the visual scripting system a ton of studios and solo devs rely on), and the C++ Gameplay Framework. Game Makers reports the keynote slide marked all three as “Remove,” not “deprecated.”
- What replaces them: Verse Gameplay APIs and an Entities and Components system, built on Epic’s Scene Graph. This is the same setup Epic has been building inside Fortnite’s creator tools.
- C++ isn’t gone from the engine: per Game Makers, C++ is still recommended for engine foundation work like physics and rendering. It’s just being pulled out of gameplay code. IndieGamesJp.dev notes Epic hasn’t said yet whether modding and extending the engine itself will still work in C++ the same way.
- When: UE6 Early Access is still targeted for the end of 2027, with the full release 12 to 18 months after that.
- Migration help: Epic says it will offer AI-assisted conversion tools to move projects over. How those tools will be delivered hasn’t been decided yet, per Game Makers.
- UE5 isn’t going anywhere yet: Epic announced Unreal Engine 5.9 at the same event, and Game Makers reports projects already in development on UE5 can keep going on the UE5 line.
Why this is a big change of plans
When Epic first laid out UE6 at Unreal Fest Chicago in June, the message was softer. Epic said UE6 would merge Unreal Engine 5 and Unreal Editor for Fortnite into one engine, and that Blueprints and Actors would still ship in the first version of UE6, only getting deprecated later once the new framework was “sufficiently mature,” as Game Developer reported at the time. Epic’s own State of Unreal 2026 recap describes Verse as a language that “transactionalizes C++” and lists three goals for UE6: moving gameplay programming to Verse, making content and code portable across games and engines, and building in AI tooling with integrations for models like Claude and Gemini.
Tokyo turned “eventually” into “gone.”
What Tim Sweeney said
According to Game Makers, Sweeney said the reason for pulling C++ out of gameplay is that it will improve development productivity and content portability compared with the old way. He said Epic’s internal work building games on Verse and Scene Graph has greatly improved efficiency and works well with AI-assisted development.
Sweeney called this “a painful change” and apologized to the community, per Game Makers. He also said Epic is feeling that pain first, pointing to how Epic moved Fortnite off Blueprints and onto Verse without ever taking the game offline.
Who gets hit hardest
- Developers who learned on Blueprints. A lot of indie and solo devs build entire games in Blueprints without writing traditional code. They’ll have to learn Verse to move to UE6.
- Plugin makers. IndieGamesJp.dev points out that physics plugins, server SDKs, audio middleware and tool integrations were built on Blueprints and the gameplay APIs. All of that has to be rebuilt for Verse, and how much Epic’s conversion tools can handle third-party plugins is still an open question.
- Big studios on UE5. They can stay on UE5, but anyone who wants UE6 features later is looking at a real migration, not a simple upgrade.
Why Xbox players should care
Unreal is the engine under a big chunk of Xbox first party right now. The Coalition built Gears of War: E-Day on Unreal Engine 5, Halo Studios announced in 2024 that future Halo games are moving to Unreal Engine 5, and Ninja Theory, Obsidian, Compulsion and Double Fine all ship Unreal games. Former Xbox PM Derek Reese recently said a lot of The Coalition’s cost goes into carrying Microsoft’s own branch of Unreal (our story on that). So any big shift in how Unreal games get made lands right on Xbox Game Studios’ roadmap. The good news: Epic says UE5 projects can stay on UE5, so nothing in development today has to change engines mid-stream.
Epic is killing Blueprints and C++ gameplay in UE6. Good move?
Vote and see what other Xbox fans think.
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OnPoint’s take: This is Epic going all in on the Fortnite way of making games, and they’re not asking permission. Blueprints are a big reason indie devs and small teams could make great-looking games at all, so killing them is a huge deal, and Sweeney apologizing up front tells you Epic knows it.
For Xbox, we actually like where this lands short term. UE5 stays supported, which means Gears, Halo and the rest of the first-party lineup aren’t getting thrown into a rewrite. And Microsoft already runs its own Unreal branch, so Xbox studios have the muscle to adopt UE6 on their own schedule instead of Epic’s. Long term, the real question is whether Verse makes games faster to build or just makes everyone more dependent on Epic. If Epic’s conversion tools are as good as promised, this could speed up dev time. If not, expect a lot of studios to camp out on UE5 for years. It is what it is, but devs, this one’s going to hurt.
Illustration: OnPoint 4 Gamers
Sources
- Game Makers: UE6, Actors and Blueprints go from “deprecated” to “removed”; C++ Gameplay Framework also dropped in full move to Verse (Nov 3, 2026, Japanese)
- IndieGamesJp.dev: UE6 also drops the C++ gameplay framework, unifying fully on Verse along with removing Blueprints (Nov 3, 2026, Japanese)
- Unreal Engine: State of Unreal 2026: Top news from the show
- GamesBeat: Unreal Engine 6 will combine UE5 and UEFN into a unified engine
- Game Developer: Unreal Engine 6 will merge UE5 and UEFN into one engine
- Inside Games / PR TIMES: Epic Games announces Unreal Engine 6 development plan at Unreal Fest Chicago 2026 (June 23, 2026, Japanese)
- X: Keynote summary post
- X news story: Unreal Engine 6 Drops Actors, Blueprints, and C++ Gameplay
