The Epic in Unreal Engine 3

CNN's Game On column has a look at Gears of War developer Epic Games. The piece goes into the company's success as a tools merchant as well as a game developer. They discuss the excitement that Unreal Engine 3 has generated, both for AAA and less ambitious titles. From the article: "Several titles, including the forthcoming 'HoopWorld' and 'RoboHordes,' will use the engine for less than AAA games. And don't be surprised if educational titles or children's games use the engine as the Xbox 360 reaches the end of its life cycle. While Epic will continue enhancing and improving Unreal Engine 3 for the next four or five years, work has already begun on Unreal Engine 4, which the company sees as a powering force for the fourth PlayStation and third Xbox machines."

Comments

Re:Use the engine on their other franchises

[RingDev]

And what about the old Commander Keen series. 'Aliens ate my Babysitter' and what not. I wouldn't mind riding a pogo stick through some UR3 environments ;)

-Rick

Re:Looking too far ahead?

[The-Bus]

What is there left to make totally realistic?

A whole lot of stuff. What excited me about early (1998) news on the Prey engine was materials reacting the way real materials do: wood catches fire and is easy to break, metal bends, bricks shatter, etc. If this can be taken care of on the engine level, this frees up designers from needing to script events where if this x-y-z space is damaged, this brush animates like this, falling in such a manner. It can also make games more, not realistic but believable.

Take Burnout for example. If I crash my sportscar into a van at 200mph, the van will pop off the ground and go flying like I swatted a ball. That in itself I don't have a problem with. But when a few seconds later I miscalculate a turn and hit a wooden newspaper stand and I explode on impact with the newspaper stand being undamaged, that I have a problem with. Putting things like these into the engine extends believability because your game world just gets a lot more cohesive.

This is just one. A whole lot more needs to be done in audio, visuals, AI, and a number of other areas. As long as we improve these while still focused on gameplay, and we should be ok.