Game engines you especially like/don't like

[Mr Puggsly]

Pemalite said:

Mr Puggsly said:

I kinda agree with your thoughts on UE3 last gen. But there was also a feeling that any game using UE3 is gonna look pretty good. Most notably, Bioshock, Mass Effect, Batman, Gears of War, Guilty Gear Xrd, Enslaved and plenty of other games looked great or had a unique presentation in spite of using the same engine.

I can see your complaint about PC, but at that time pushing PC graphics wasn't really a focus. I mean outside of EA, Ubisoft and random studios like CD Projekt.

Mass Effect 1 looked brilliant on Unreal Engine 3 at the time... Same with Mass Effect 2, Especially on 360. - The engine wasn't regarded as archaic by that point.
But by the time we got to Mass Effect 3 the engine limitations were starting to become readily apparent with blurry textures, skyboxes with limited resolution,  that sort of thing... Still a highly artistic game, but the engine was certainly holding it back compared to say... What Frostbite could deliver, especially on PC.

curl-6 said:

I don't disagree with your point, but fun fact; Bioshock (and Bioshock 2) actually run on Unreal Engine 2, not 3.

Unreal Engine 2.5. But it was modified and added a ton of new effects to water, lighting and shadowing. - Helped rewrite some shaders for Bioshock back in the day to enable backwards compatibility on older GPU's just like with Oblivion.

In theory Bioshock 1 and 2 could have been ported to the Original Xbox as the engine was capable of running on that hardware really well.

Mass Effect 3's underwhelming presentation might be more reflective of Bioware than the engine. Frostbite delivers great visuals but primarily just when DICE is using it for Battlefield games. Also, the Battlefield games tend to treat PC as the lead especially during the 7th gen.

I think the OG Xbox could have handled Bioshock in some form. Just look at the iOS version of Bioshock, that looks much worse than games like Doom 3, Half Life 2 and Riddick on the OG Xbox. What I was really saying is the project likely changed very much over what might have been planned for 6th gen hardware, it just kept the same engine. That's why UE is so popular though, it certainly does scale.