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EA Announces Multi-Title Unreal Engine 3 License

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hope-that-goes-well dept.

An anonymous reader writes to mention a Gamasutra article about a surprising announcement from EA. They've made the move to license the Unreal 3 Engine for a series of next-generation titles. "The brief announcement states that EA 'employs a variety of engines, tools and technologies to best serve the needs of each game and development team', but raises interesting issues regarding the Criterion-authored Renderware engine, purchased by EA in 2004 alongside the Burnout developer, and its intended global EA rollout."

2 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. The engine isn`t that important anymore by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There used to be a time where your engine defined what you could do in a game, and the engine you choose would have a massive impact on the quality of game you could produce; I think these days are long gone. If you discount certain cutting edge graphical techniques, there are few (gameplay modifying) features that are implemented in the Unreal 3/Doom 3 engines that could not be done in an open source engine written in Java.

    Personally, I think that it is time that someone focuses on generating an open source java framework that is designed around splitting a game engine into its smaller components (Graphics, Physics, Scripting and AI); this would allow for smaller (more focused) open source projects to exist which (should) produce higher quality results.

  2. Game engine consolidation by Dr.+Spork · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I guess if there is anything here to wonder at, it's that this game engine consolidation did not gather steam sooner. Maybe EA, who's been vacuuming up small game companies, whanted their newly-acquired employees to maintain a brief sense of independence. But if you're a game company that cranks out dozens of games a year, with almost all of them being 3D in some way, it makes sense to standardize. I would guess their intention with Renderware is to make it a very modular, clean and optimized game engine, so that its core can be used across all the lines of EA games. This will make redundant lots of the back-end people in EA's recent acquisitions. The people who remain will "generate content" for THE game engine.

    I'm not sure whether this is bad or good. I was thinking it might make future games feel generic, but then I thought... more than now? Let's hope not. But maybe the generic feel of today's FPSes is that the oft-reused game engines are not quite flexible enough, so the player "recognizes" the engine underneath. Maybe in the future they will fix that.