Activision licenses Unreal Engine 3. Hooray.
Well, so much for creativity. Everyone's games are now on the Unreal Engine 3. Namco, Midway, Square Enix and now Activision. Frankly, I don't know who to blame. It certainly isn't Epic's fault. They just made the best engine they could to suit their needs and went ahead and used it. That engine spawned a hit game in the form of Gears of War and now every Tom, Dick and Harry wants a piece of the success.
Do they try to make a better engine? Heavens, no. Why should they do that when they've got money pouring out their ears and can simply license someone else's hard work to make their own lives easier?
Midway licensed the engine. That didn't annoy me. Midway stopped impressing me a long time ago, so I didn't really care. Square Enix licensed the engine. I didn't mind that either. The company's best games are heavily story-oriented and if they're planning something of such a grand scale that they feel they absolutely need the engine to concentrate more on the actual game itself, I won't complain.
Activision? They don't need to license the engine. Not at all. The company's been doing just fine by itself. I don't see Ubisoft licensing it. Why? Because they refuse to follow the other monkeys to the banana.
I'm disappointed. Everyone's going to use the same "excuse" Square did and end up cashing in on someone else's hard work.
3 comments:
While visually impressive I've been disappointed with the feel of several Unreal2 engine games. Perhaps that was just design decisions or not tweaking basic physics settings. Q3 engine seemed miles more responsive and fun to play.
I do wonder if Carmack and id didn't take a real wrong path with the D3 engine and thats why we're seeing Epic getting a larger share.
It is a shame that, off the top of my head, Serious2 and Crytek engines aren't getting more love and support. We really need that 3D pissing contest to continue and for that multiple engines need to be pushed around.
Call me stupid but I don't have the slightest idea what an gaming engine does. I know that burnout uses Renderware - The game and the engine are both made by Criterion - I also know the Midnight Club 3 uses Renderware but there is no way you can tell both games are based on the same engine. I thought that it was an engine for racing games, makes sense right?
Well I looked it up and there non racing games that uses that engine. games like: Bleach: Erabareshi Tamashii, Crackdown, Manhunt, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, Sonic and the Secret Rings the list goes on and on. So what exactly does an engine do and how is it bad that all the companies use the same engine? Apparently they can tweak it enough to make every game a total different experience.
I believe the engine is the core technology to handle, physics, graphics, sound etc. It comes complete with developer tools and is continually updated by the engine developer (depending on the license agreement).
The game developer can of course make whatever tweaks they like to the engine but generally the point of licensing is that they can concentrate their efforts on making the game and content and not the technology to realise that game.
Really modern games are nothing but Mods and total conversions of these existing engines. Hence my comment that a lot of Unreal2 games felt similar to me because they probably left the physics alone.
So I don't think its bad that people use engines but I do think the correct selection of an engine or the willingness to tweak it makes a big difference in the types and quality of games we'll see.
An example is that the Q3 engine was not designed for large outdoor areas where as the Serious engine was. Team Arena suffered terrible FPS drops when you got into open terrain despite a lot of tweaking by the actual creators of the engine.
Now I've not really seen much of the U3 engine to see how it performs. I know that the Doom engine has had a rough start but ET:QW has addressed a lot of those issues and may bring it to maturity.
In the end choice is good and big publishers all going for the same engine is never going to turn out great, as I said these geeks need the pissing contest to outdo their counterparts.
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