The Gears of War developer claims that studios will stick to their current engine for launch titles on next-gen consoles and will need time to shift to the newer one.
For those who are not as tech-savvy or familiar with the technical side of video games, here is a bit of background. An engine is the software on which the game is built, it defines the limits of what can be achieved in a game in terms of physics, lighting,
etc and the game is actually built using the software as its foundation.
Some popular engines are FrostBite 2 which was developed by DICE and used for Battlefield 3, Source engine, which was developed by Valve and used for Half-Life and the Havok engine.
However, the most commonly used engine by many developers is the Unreal engine which was developed by Epic Games. The Unreal Engine recently showed off its fourth iteration at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) which was held recently but Mark Rein, the
Vice President of Epic Games believed that there was still time for the Unreal 4 engine to be used as much as Unreal 3.
“I think if you were going to do a launch title for a future console, UE3 would probably be the way to go. And likewise if you were going to do something cross-generational, like Mortal Kombat on PS Vita, Xbox, PS3 and potentially it could be on iPad...that’s
Unreal.”
He also stated that the future of gaming depended on games to be available on a variety of platforms as portable and mobile gaming became ever so popular among the masses.
“Not everybody, but lots of people would like to take their games to more and more places. It’s not enough to just have a PC game anyone.”
He went on to give the example of Dungeon Defenders and how it became such a huge success, “Look at Dungeon Defenders; iOS, Android, Steam, Xbox Live, PSN, web, Mac...they sold a million units, and this is a small developer. So I think it’s not just up or
down, but it’s also horizontal.”
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