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What is Wrong With Game Development?
Warrior-GS writes "Seamus Blackley, who has done everything from work at Looking Glass Studios to evangelize for the Microsoft Xbox, sounds off on what's wrong with the relationship between developers, publishers and their audience. Also, as part of coverage of the D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas, GameSpy has chats with Miyamoto about The Wind Waker and Yu Suzuki about his gaming influences. Some interesting reading."
I've found the latest crop of games to be really great. For instance, Battlefield 1942 and Metroid Prime are probably two of the best games I've _ever_ played in my life.
I think maybe the companies put too much stress on the developers to create hits, but as a part-time developer, I think it's easier said than done to just create a smash hit out of thin air. Everything's already been done, or so it seems, so really original and entertaining gameplay+graphics is a tough combination to create.
31 people regularly point & click my G-spot
Typically, users are queried by publishers at different levels. Sony is especially keen on this. However, most Slashdot readers probably refuse to participate on principals of anonymity. Did you fill out your registration card and return it to Sony with the games you like and additional comments? Probably not. Have you logged on to Sony's site and returned feedback on what you like, want to see, etc? Probably not. But there is a large group of people who /do/ do this and they weigh heavily in Sony's conception of what their typical user is (Sony even has a lame word for them: "Imaginator") - and thus on what games they will push for development and advertising.
Is it just me or does everyone else think that the older systems, like the atari and nintendo put out way higher quality games (as far as gameplay goes)than the modern systems seem to provide?
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
Sometimes we'll sit around when we're bored and think of ways games could be better; different implementation systems and cool ideas that would just kick ass in games. Developers should just randomly show up at lan parties and ask questions. =)
I was happy to see that he pointed out that there is a fairly sizable difference between game reviewers, and the average gamer. Now, don't get me wrong, I love Gamespot and IGN as much as the next guy, and I always yank a few reviews before I buy a game, but most of their reviewers have a different philosophy than I do.
They sit there and carefully and systematically work through each game, taking notes on the sound, music, graphics, etc. They evaluate the game the same way Roger Ebert carefully picks through a movie and sees it's good bits and bad bits.
But then, every once in a while, the normal non-professional movie fan just says "Fuck it," and rents Six String Samurai.
It's the same thing with games. I mean, I loved the depth and careful construction that went into the last Final Fantasy game. I appreciate the graphical detail in the last Warcraft game. But unlike a professional game reviewer, I'll occasionally just say screw it all and toss a quarter in the Ms. Pac-Man machine in the local arcade.
The average gamer often just wants something fun. Games that start as 300 page design documents just don't sound fun, no matter how much effort went into them. Now, maybe if the game started out as a 15 page comic book.....
"Isn't that the sweetest little well-balanced undergraduate-level philosophy of life."
A programmer can only code for so many hours every day. It's not like turning a light on or off; programming takes time, the right moment, and deep concentration to be done right.
I love programming. It's like a cross between a fine art, such as opera, and a deeply complex science, such as molecular physics. There's a math portion of it, and there's an art portion of it. But the bottom line is that there's no business part of coding. So, when managers and the other suits try to tell the coders, "OK, well put in a good 8 hrs of coding today, and Mike and Punjab will as well, and we'll have 24 hrs of coding done today on NewGameApp v1.0." Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.
Go read Mythical Man Month [Link]. It's all about these typical manegerial expectations and how they're blatantly wrong.
You want to fix game development? STOP WORKING THE PROGRAMMERS SO HARD.
31 people regularly point & click my G-spot
Video games nowadays are becoming much more complicated beasts and require much larger teams... they are much more a product of their process and much less a product of the talent creating them. If the process is broken, you get crap no matter how good the individual developers are. All is not lost, though... Hollywood uses the same model. I think we will see the video game equivalent of a "Director" emerge... someone who manages the process to create something of quality. I think companies like Blizzard already do this well (although their "Directors" are fairly anonymous, I'll bet they are there).
Most of ID's work could be concidered open source. ID has popped the cherry for 1000's of programers/wannabe developers.
The gaming industry as a whole allows easy access to employment if your any good. I've watched at least thirty people go from newbie to getting jobs at some of the biggest companies and still are friends with a few.
This is actually a very interesting comment, since it relates to the very issue that's being discussed in the article. It seems that any industry that involves any kind of publishing entity, faces the same problems. Publishers are in it to make money, and they'll do what will make that happen - even if it means throttling back things like creativity and innovation. What I'd like to see (and quite frankly, what I'm surprised hasn't happened in a more visible given the presence of the internet), is for publishing companies to fall by the wayside, while the creative types establish either a centralized or easily-accessible e-distribution channel.
This whole publishing thing, it seems, is just BEGGING for a different, more efficient business model (both monetarily and in terms of intangible factors like creativity). Games developers who aren't with any of the 'big few' who make big bucks on a good release, are stuck with working with publishers. I get the impression that publishers often make the process more tedious, and are in a prime position to lower the integrity of the process by dorking around with royalties, net revenue figures, etc - all of which are used to ascertain how much the game developer gets paid. I'd love to see this process changed so that games developers, like music artists, get more of what they deserve, and and a lot less of the burden introduced by the current business model.
So... whats wrong with game development? Or rather, why does the games of today seem to suck compared to the ones I played when I was young?
I think there are many reasons, some off which has ben adressed by other posters. Still, beeing me, I'm gonna list up the ones I think are among the most important.
- Lack of any attemt of original gameplay. Most, or all, of todays games are simply 'more of the same'.
- Too much focus on 'eyecandy'. Modern games look the part, but often I find that too much development has gone into good looks, and too little into things like plot, levels and gameplay.
-Rehashing of old ideas. What is 'Medal of Honor'? Simply a better version of the original 'Doom'. And what was 'Doom' in the first place, but a souped up version of the original 'Castle Wolfenstain'?
Don't misunderstand me. I still buy and enjoy games... but I'm not sucked in as I was before.
The downfall of the gaming industry, I feel, began when the graphicsadaptors started becomming good enought to allow for 'nearly real' gameplay. That shifted the focus away from good games and towards games that looked good. Maybe because it was easy to describe a scene where you had to feed a 10' carrot to a mutant spacebunny as long as you had to rely on text, but impossible to do it visually. That, and while a textphraser could actually make sence out of what you wrote, a visualy based game was dumbed down to walk about and clicking on stuff.
Maybe a game like Valhalla could solve that last problem - eyecandy and a reasonable smart textphraser.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Shigeru Miyamoto: For me, the most interesting thing about video games is taking the controller and using it to move something around on the screen.
Hmmm, indeed. Is everybody sure this is the actual genius behind the classics like SMB?
Can't be, everybody knows the most interesting thing is watching the characters play out a dramatic and artistic movie everytime something happens (a la Blood Omen 2, Final Fantasy 8.) Doesn't he know how hard it is to create a program that takes input from the player and actually does it on the screen!?!?
Furthermore, there is no need for the player to control his/her character (Myst, Riven.) They are just there to fork over the dough for our cheeply made, low budget movie clips! How dare he malign our marketing model.
Gamers *playing* games. Hummprf. The nerve...
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."
Doom 3 and Id's idology, as well as the problems with SimCity 4 are illustrations of what is wrong.
Id has indicated that no matter what hardware the gamers have will not be enough for Doom 3, while I understand that games have pushed hardware upgrades in the past, usually it was due to new technology in the game (3D engine changes, multiplayer, etc) Id is simply making a game that is going to overwhelm almost everyone's hardware and they think that is cool.
SimCity 4 was shipped and it's slow as crap on machines twice the recommended hardware on the box because they put too much crap in there going on.
Game designers have a case of the God-complex in many cases, and I say that's what is wrong in the industry.
Now he has a Master (publishers, the market, whatever) and it's not for himself anymore. That's the problem with turning pro: in the end, the only thing you really do for yourself, is get your paycheck. I face the same problem in my job; I don't always get to do what I want. That's why it's called "work" instead of "play."
Don't like it? Quit working 16 hour days, and save some of that passion and energy for your amateur projects after you get home. The market never shares your values. If they did, they wouldn't have to pay you.
He seems to think the problem is with the middlemen, though, and that he would be happy to serve the end users (the "audience"). I'm not convinced this is really the way to happiness either (ahem, I said: the market never shares your values) but I guess he disagrees. I guess it is a fairly decent compromise to have at least a little fun, but still make a buck.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I think this article is trying to address why the production companies can't call a predictable hit and are looking for a *just add water* receipe.
IMO, 80% of games *fail* cause they're incomplete due to ($place money here$). There has always been a few great games that come out every few years, hell I still play duke3d if the inspiration hits just right. Mind you; it would be nice to see a real scripting engine come out that can tell a story in the FPS genre with out guns and a storyline to get lost in.
On a side note--I've always wanted a well scripted game that manipulates me into sitting in a smokey country bar with Dwight Yoakam rhinestones and all, playing to a rowdy crowd of hicks. But my tastes my be a little pecurliar.
Oh yeah. Didn't like Abuse much.
Anyway my point was just that most of the stuff Id has released hasn't been very good. Impressive technically, but not that good.
I'm sure I'm not the only slashdotter whose written games for personal amusement. Nor am I the only one whose distributed them to friends and gotten positive responces (I think honestly, but they might have just been being nice to me).
Now picture all those games coming unsorted through some sort of web portal. Combined with buggy games, games which only run on an SGI mainframe, games with trojan horses, over-used joke games (thermonuclearwar, the game that just pops up a dialog saying "You lose") and downright trolls (a game built around goatse.cx).
Now, I'm not saying publishers are the only way to strain this down to something acceptable. Gaming magazines can give reviews (though less than 1% of games would ever get reviewed at all); players would have favorite game authors; there could even be something like slashdot moderation (we all know how well that works -- actually, IMHO, it's one of the better forms I've seen).
I'm just saying that publishers can't just "get out of the way" -- they can only be replaced by something better.
A lot of the ideas here are based on an essay of Eric Flint's. He expounds in detail.
.sig: We go to war with Iraq to prevent them from building nukes and using them against us, destabilizing Pakistan, allowing Al-queada to get nukes, and use them against us -- oh the irony!
Sig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right
What is wrong with game development?
Microsoft, and even moreso: Electronic Arts.
Both are large corperations that don't practice much innovation (Honestly... Madden 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003???), but since the mid to late '90s have been running around buying out smaller developers, milking whatever profits they can out of the franchises, and letting the studios wither on the vine.
It was only a few weeks ago that it was announced that Westwood (now a subsidiary of EA) was closeing up it's Las Vegas development offices. When WAS the last time anything good came out of the C&C series? I bet it predates Westwood's fall to EA.
Westwood in particular stings ME hard, because, before EA, they used to do some REALLY cool games outside C&C. Remember the Blade Runner "adventure" game? That was one of my faves. Do you think that, under EA's flag, we'll EVER see anything from Westwood but more played-out C&C's?
Or take microsoft's assimilation of one of my other previously-favroite game developers: Bungie. I STILL dig out Marathon and Myth every so often. And who else remembers all the previews of what Halo was going to be before gates had it stripped down to become the Xbox's flagship yet-another-generic-FPS.
Back to EA... Remember Origin? Remember Autoduel and Ogre? What about the Wing Commander series? Crusader? BioForge? Remember the excellent storytelling in the old Ultima series? I sure do. What is Origin all about NOW though, under the stewardship of EA? Ultima Online, Ultima Online expansions, and a sequel to... Ultima Online!
Remember "Jane's"? Remember the excellent military simulations of the '90s. 688i, in particular, STILL has quite a following. Quite an achievement for a game released in 1997! Where is Jane's now? Electronic arts. What has Jane's done recently? Nothing since 2000.
Remember when Maxis had a sence of humor? Remember when they released some really WIERD sims? Remember Sim Ant, Sim Earth, and Sim Tower? NOW what does Maxis do? Well, they just released another Sim City... one which I'm told is STILL not as fun as Sim City 2000 was. Oh, and they do expansion packs for The Sims. Quick check of EA's site to be sure.... yup.
I'm sure there are MORE game studios that others could name that have been assimilated by microsoft or EA. The above are mostly my pet peeves in the "large corperations buying and destroying small game studios" world. But I think THAT is the problem with game development. In my experience as a gamer, studios have been so much more creative, and... well... FUN when they were independent. The big corperations seem to forget that games are supposed to be FUN. They just see a trend (FPS, RTS, MMRPG, etc.), and want to milk it dry.
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
I have first-hand experience here, working on Infinity for Gameboy Color. Sure, GBC is obsolete, and we really should nuke that web site right now, since it isn't going anywhere, but a few years ago it was hot stuff.
The GBC glaringly lacked RPGs. At the time, I could safely say that the best RPG for the platform was Final Fantasy Legend 3, and that was for the monochrome GB! Infinity was going to change that. It was a game SquareSoft would have made, had they stayed around to make GBC games. Our game played a little like something between FF2 and FF3, with a full 25,000 word story. No real innovation here (except for maybe the battle system), we were simply trying to fill a nitch on the platform. For that reason, we got so many emails from gamers wondering when this thing would be released. After all, their only other choice was Pokemon. Many of them wondered if we would face a similar fate as Mythri, another GBC title that you never saw (both games were highlighed on RPGamer).
Unfortunately, Infinity never saw the light of day because we couldn't land a publisher. We sent a letter out to nearly all publishers, but in only three cases did they contact us back: EA, Nintendo, Crave. I actually flew to Washington to meet a guy at Nintendo (pretty cool place, looks just like the stuff in the pictures), only to be denied an offer. He did, however, show me a GBA prototype with Mario Kart. Sure, Mario Kart is a cool game, but I wanted to play an RPG. On the first day we met with Crave, the guy asked if we could substitute the characters with some from a movie. We tried to get them to go along with the game as-is, and we had a long negotiation period, but they ended up just stringing us along with no result. At one point, their plan was to show the game at E3 2001, but we were denied that also (I even have the 1 poster of the game we had made for the occasion, hanging on the wall behind me right now).
What I learned from all this is that publishers generally only want to take safe bets. Why go for a risky RPG when you can just make Men in Black 2? It pained me to walk down the GBC isle at stores and see something featuring the Olsen twins. How on earth do these games get published, but ours not? It is the sad state of the game industry.
That does depend somewhat on the sequel. Buying Fallout 2 because you enjoyed Fallout so much is not being part of the problem for example. Fallout 2 was an improvement in some ways (interface), and a regression in others (primarily storyline), but it was quality, just like the original. Most importantly though, it bucked the trends that were starting towards realtime play (Baldur's Gate came out at around the same time).
...
OTOH, buying Fallout Tactics without trying the demo is being part of the problem. FOT probably sold more than Fallout 1&2 combined (in particular, it sold more at full price) but from all I've read and from my playing of the demo it's really got nothing to do with the ideas behind Fallout. It's just an isometric tactical shooter which happens to use the SPECIAL system and hence capitalised on brand recognition. People buying FOT promoted the idea to publishers that real-time combat variants were "it" and turn-based should be abandoned.
Thank goodness for Troika. Can't wait for Greyhawk: The Temple of Elemental Evil
In music, I think we have good case studies
now which show that it is possible to "say all
that is worth saying" within a genre. Look
at the "big band music" genre -- by the end
of WWII it had all been said, and the innovators
moved on to create new types of jazz. The
bands that play that music today do it as
historical preservation. Given a set of
instruments, and stylistic rules for
writing to the instruments, there is only
so much one can say.
I won't touch a 10 hour game unless I see it in the bargin bin for $10.
An excellent 10 hour game is an oxymoron.
Blackley was the "producer" for that game, and also wrote (unsuccessfully) the physics engine. "Why did physics code that was barely usable actually ship?" says Game Developer's postmortem, which names Blackley as the major problem with the project.
Blackley has since turned to evangelism and punditry, at which he's better.
I don't think so - most hard core gamers will buy Windows just to play games, and most non-hard core gamers (i.e. the Wal Mart crowd) is already running windows anyways.
Macs and Unix are still just a drop in the bucket, OS wise. OpenGL, while it mostly works, isn't the bestest thing in the world.
Anyways, a good development house will have their own video library that wraps all the DirectX stuff, making it possible without too much pain to port to another library by just linking in a different DLL with the same wrapper functions (or maybe even use the same library but just with different state flags set!). Most don't do the port cause the market isn't there, but it isn't as horrible a thing as you might imagine.
Government IS the problem.
Wow, a lot of that stuff is just the opposite of what I like in a game:
...
He feels that more of a focus should be made on the mass-market consumer
So, basically we already have the entire entertainment industry boiling products down to the *lowest* common intellectual denominator, and this guy proposes that games design be further trimmed down and be based even *more* on more consumer polling data??? Great.
Yet we make games that require 10, 20, 30, or more hours for the gamer to fully enjoy
And I thought that we already live in an instant-gratification culture that has reduced our average attention span to below 10 seconds! And now we need more ego shooters and mario clones that don't require your brain to be used *at all* because having something esoteric like a story line (or any kind of in-game development process, for that matter) is taking away too much of our time?
Well, that's all not what I think the direction of games development should be. Computer games are becoming a more important social factor every year. Soon, they may take the place of television in the areas entertainment and education, especially for children. I don't care what marketers say, the nature of the games we play *does* reflect and even influence the state of our society. And please, I'm not talking about sex and violence here. But we should think hard about if we want to align our entire society by the lowest common denominator. I think not.
If that prick Carmack would give back his Ferrari, we could have some good games.
Seriously though, like democracy, the free market is the worst way to develop games, except for all of the other ways.
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
A realistic driving sim models:
a) tire temperatures/wear curve/slip curve
b) aerodynamic drag and downforce (very important for simulating slipstreaming effect)
c) weight distribution (shifting fuel load, engine placement and ballasts)
d) suspension geometry (camber and toe changes, caster angles, and the effect of anti-roll bars)
e) suspension dynamics (damper rates and spring rates)
f) powertrain
g) drivelines (differentials, gear ratio, clutch)
The parameters listed above are not reserved for some pie-in-the-sky simulation program written in the academia. Every *realistic* driving simulation games have had those parameters modelled, and in some case user-modifiable, since 1998.
Here is a list of realistic driving game:
1) Grand Prix Legends
2) Nascar 2003
3) F1 2002
4) M3 mod & GTR2002 mod for F1-2002 (free)
5) Viper Racing
6) NetKar (free and add-ons)
7) Live for speed (free during beta testing)
8) Racer (free)
My personal favorite these days? M3 mod for F1-2002.
Three years later, frankly I wanted to kill myself - or never play another videogame as long as I lived, whichever was easier. Luckily I got the chance to move out of games and into movies (but that's another story).
I'd been playing arcade games since the Seventies, had most of the computers that were around in the Eighties and the consoles in the Nineties. And as I got older, I realised that the more advanced the technology became... the less fun the games were.
Don't get me wrong, there have been games I've enjoyed playing in the past few years - Halo, the original Tomb Raider, Goldeneye, Crazy Taxi, MGS, Unreal Tourney (once all the Futurama mods are put in). But these days, the 'big' games just require too much of an investment of time for too little reward to be worth it. I was talking to a guy I used to work with who's now on an Xbox mag, and he told me that a senior designer at one of the majors had admitted that his company doesn't bother spending too much time on game ending sequences "because hardly anyone can be bothered to play that long". Chicken or egg?
Certainly, the only big game I've played through to the end in the last few years has been Halo, and even that had some infuriating bits where I was very close to putting it down forever. FFVII I gave up on when I got stuck fighting Barrett's ex-mate and had to keep sitting through five minutes of exposition before getting killed again. MGS - getting blown up by Metal Gear Rex for the fiftieth time was just too much. Even something like Jet Set Radio Future's skyscraper stage... life is just too short!
I actually get more fun out of a quick blast on MAME or Frodo or Spectacle, or Robotron on GBA, or 30 minutes of Crazy Taxi on DC, than any of the so-called megagames of the moment. I have no interest in committing 70 hours of my life to some game (which I know is going to frustrate me with the die/retry trial-and-error loop that designers still think is *soooooo* clever) when there are other things I could be doing.
Not even Miyamoto is infallible - I couldn't be arsed to play through to the end of Ocarina Of Time, simply because I got caught in a die/retry loop and decided I couldn't face playing through the same section yet *again* just to reach the next checkpoint.
The idea of the 'short, sharp shock' seems to have all but disappeared from modern designers. But right now, those are the only kind of games that I have the time (and patience) to play. I've seen everything already - there hasn't been a new gaming genre for years, and nobody seems to even be bothering with new twists on what's already been done. (After three years on an N64 mag, I'd rather eat my own toenails than play another 3D platformer with a cartoony hero. Oh look, the ice level! The volcano level! The minecarts! The jungle! The haunted house! FUCK RIGHT OFF AND DIE, YOU UNIMAGINATIVE SHITEHAWKS!)
The only problem is, nobody's developing games that are designed for a quick 10-15 minute blast, because the focus groups want FMV and level bosses. I couldn't care less about FMV if the game's playable, and I *hate* level bosses, so that's why the big, bland game companies that thankfully I don't have to deal with any more aren't getting any of my money...
You must think in Russian.
Open Source developers unite! We are not bound by the $$, so we are free to create any game we wish. Forget about cool programming techniques, think about a great game idea - the game you've always wanted to play - then check out sourceforge to see if anyon'e building it. If they are, join them. If not, start it yourself and finish it.
Then we can see if we can produce some unique, high quality games.
So basically he wants to reduce the amount of sequels by making videogames more mainstream. Uhm...There was plenty of innovation and less sequel-whoring going on before the eminently mainstream PS, and it just got worse as gamers flocked to PS2 and XBox, and even Gamecube, though for sheer lack of games it has also less sequels.
The point is, mainstream public audiences feast on sequels. But then, this is the same guy that blamed all the industry in Shigeru Miyamoto, and how until we start making 'adult' games (read "2XTreme!" games) the industry is going to stagnate. Has he forgotten that Shigeru Miyamoto is the only person who still actively innovates within videogames *and* sells well?
The real title should be along the lines of what's wrong with Non-Sony game development.
I'm not talking about PC vs. Console flame wars, nor PS2 vs. XBox, but it is important to point out that the first article mentions NOTHING about Sony and it's relationship with developers. Or, for that matter, the sales of PS2 gaming consoles and games vs. those of X-Box and Nintendo.
It's not contested that Microsoft and Nintendo need to get their act together. PC makers have it the hardest, given the wide variety of hardware out there (and the combinations thereof).
But Sony isn't exactly hurting in this economy. In fact, they quadrupled their profits just last year.
Plus, Sony wants to eliminate any charge for development on the PS3, adding a freedom that PC developers have enjoyed for some time.
The Playstation 2 is technically inferior to the GameCube, XBox, and most modern PCs, yet it continues to net a more than substantial share of the market. This alone, if anything, is a sign that graphic/hardware superiority in games isn't "all that".
All rebuffs/criticism welcome.
I still play the original Quake, on a daily basis, 6 years after its release! I think that Quake is a great game! It added true 3D gameplay to the first person shooter genre, in addition to multiplayer over the internet. No other first person shooter, to this day, offers the fast and furious deathmatch gameplay that Quake offers. Just hop onto a server running "The Bad Place" map, along with 15 other people. Its a blast!
Those things might seem common today, but then everything that The Legend of Zelda does is common today. Is it a bad game?
You know, I have a really hard time agreeing with that. What you say is very true, but there's something that's striking a bad chord.
The only really great game I can think of that used another game's engine was Half Life. Even then, the Quake engine was HEAVILY modified. There's all sorts of other "me-too" FPS's out there that use the UT or Quake engines, but for the most part, those bore me to death. Games that really stand out in my mind are games that couldn't have possibly used the engine from another game.
When Epic or id make an engine, they're making the engine for their game, Unreal or Quake, right? (Humor me here, I know UT and Quake are nothing more than tech demos to show off the engines these days, but just follow me) These guys, they sit down and they build an engine to do really cool 3D stuff and acheive basic principles of gameplay that are standard in the industry. It's the same idea already stated here about making sequels. I can easily see some producer saying, "X game did well and IT used the Q3 engine, so why can't you?" It's financially secure, sure, but restricts development, because it's not made for X game. It's made for tons of games. That's why Quake and UT are straight up boring deathmatch/CTF games. That's why there's no depth. They're falling to the lowest common demoninator.
Let's look at the real standout games of the past while in my mind: Rez, Silent Hill 2, Contra: Shattered Soldier, Ikaruga, Zelda: Wind Waker, Metroid Prime, Mario Sunshine, Eternal Darkness, Splinter Cell, Steel Batallion, Guilty Gear X2, etc. These games could not have been accomplished on someone else's engine. You can tweak an engine all you want, but in order to make a game that really fits like a glove, you've gotta build your own that's designed specifically for that game.
Now, there are exceptions to this. Sega used the Jet Set Radio graphics engine for a few of their arcade titles, but that's where similarities ended. GTA VC used the GTAIII engine, but it was also THE SAME FRIGGING GAME. The THPS engine's been passed around quite a bit, but then again, all those XTREME sports games are the SAME FRIGGING GAMES, too.
Liscensed engines stand in the way of innovation, for sure, and if you ask me, innovation is by far the most precious and important thing in video games today. Because what the world really needs is another deathmatch game. Or more crappy platformers that try like hell to look like Jak & Daxter. Or more stealth action games with retarded enemy AI.
Next thing we gotta do is convince the magazines to hire reviewers with brains in their heads. That would help, too.