Cool thread!
id Tech is an interesting one for me; games like Doom 3, (id tech 4) Rage, (5, this one was well optimised on consoles at least) Doom 2016, Wolfenstein II, (6) and Doom Eternal (7) looked phenomenal for their time. The latter three games even got impressive ports to Switch which speaks to the engine's scalability. id tech 8 on PS5/Xbox Series is gonna be insane when it inevitably arrives.
RE engine I like as well; it managed to squeeze some nice results out of the Switch with Monster Hunter Rise, while the recent Resident Evil games built on it look awesome on PC/PS/Xbox.
It's predecessor MT Framework was a showstopper as well; RE5 on PS3/360 was a stunner on release, RE Revelations was by far and away the best looking games on 3DS, and Monster Hunter World showed it pushed a whole generation beyond what it was designed for but still delivering the goods.
The elephant in the room is Unreal. UE3 was a beast on 360 with the Gears of War games, and it was cool to see it extend into the next generation too with the likes of Batman Arkham Knight and Outlast II holding their own well passed the release of UE4.
UE4 of course brought us beautiful games like Hellblade, Bright Memory Infinite, Gears 5, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, and on Switch a lot of excellent ports as well as Yoshi's Crafted World and the Octopath Traveler games.
UE5 looks incredibly promising, but for all the impressive tech demos, it has yet to produce an actual shipping game that wows me. Feels like we've been waiting forever for it to blow us away, but I guess that's the reality of how long game development takes these days.
CryEngine deserves a mention too, both for the legendary Crysis games, but also less well known but still beautiful games like Kingdom Come Deliverance and Ryse Son of Rome.
As the industry moves more and more towards standardizing development around a select few third party engines like Unreal and Unity, it's cool to still see companies like Capcom retaining their own custom in house tech.
Last edited by curl-6 - on 29 April 2023
