Post here some of your favorite games engines.

Personally, I do like Unreal Engine, Unity, and RE Engine. Resident Evil 7 and the Remakes runs quite good on RE Engine, and the visuals are stunning. I still can't believe how good Layers of Fear looks on Unity. Also, Unreal Engine is usually not very demanding, and it can create wonderful titles.

Also, a engine I actually dislike is ID Tech 5. Games are very heavy, and I don't remember a title that was well optmized on it. Heck, I can play Resident Evil 7, but my PC struggle to run The Evil Within. Well, I'm talking as a PC gamer, maybe on consoles it's better...

What about your thoughts?

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.

Capcom's MT Framework.  Through the 7th generation and the 8th it was very flexible and while Capcom had some of it's worst years then they also put out some great stuff. DMC4. EX Troopers. UvC3,Sengoku Basara, Dragon's Dogma,Tatsunoko vs Capcom remains to me their best fighting game in the the last 15 years. Even as recently as Capcom Fighting collection used it.  Deep Down's engine was supposed to replace it but that went belly up. RE Engine looks to be a worthy successor or one of the best in house engines ever.

Whatever Nintendo used for Xenoblade on Wii. Fucking thing was unbreakable! Monolith are the kings of open world games to me in polish. Bethesda's fuck ups are well known. GTA has had plenty of issues. Cyberpunk 2077 even after all this time I have ran into a bunch of bugs. Ubisoft games full of them. Yet Xenoblade games remain rock solid. Original Xenoblade engine you could use Homebrew to put in cheats for the game. I enabled the moon jump. Basically I can ascend in the sky forever. I never ran out of bounds. Left the sky box. Even tho I held it down for minutes. I let go landed on the ground and the game went on like nothing happened. It's not just QA tho obviously it's great but also I would not break the game. Monolith are amazing. Side note they are the best 1st party studio not in house at getting the most out of hardware to me. How Xenoblade games look and run on such limited hardware is wizardry. Same with Botw given Monolith assists on those.

Renderware was another great one. If you played a number of games in the PS2 era you likely played a game on this engine. Esp if you played GTA.  It was about as common then as UE is now.

I feel like I'd have to be a game dev to answer this properly.

Uhh, I guess if you just mean the engine whose games I like the most... Think most of my favorite games have proprietary engines, but when they don't, they're usually Unity, so, that.

Of course, having no background in game design or any work on these engines, we can only truly speculate.

Of course, Unreal, RE Engine and some propriety ones have pulled out some really nice results with different aesthetic works too.

We can also give a good shoutout for Nintendo own game engines used for their core développed games like Zelda, Mario, Mario Kart, etc ... Especially despite the weaker use of hardware. They never felt too much out of place.

Also a good shoutout to Monolith Soft. The way they can put an insane amount of work on the game engine used for the Xenoblade games is quite mind boggling seeing how polished and productive they've got with it this generation.

Don't know if they'll use the same framework when they switch to the next Nintendo console but I hope the transition to better hardware makes them shine even more !

I feel like this question mattered more 20-25 years ago. Back in the day you could instantly tell what was made with the Doom Engine. Same with the Unreal Engine and the Quake 1/2/3 engines. These days, if you're not a developer, it's a lot harder to actually see the differences from a glance. Games these days are more defined by the devs ability to create assets, optimize code, and run on the hardware. The visual differences are much more subtle. At least to my old eyes.

 Eh even in the 7th generation it wasn't hard to tell a UE3 game by one simple thing. UE3 had this thing and while not exclusive to it. Was the most common with UE3. Level loaded but the textures take a few seconds longer.

Retro Studios' in-house engine R.U.D.E. is a hell of a piece of kit as well.

It produced some of the best graphics on Gamecube, Wii, and Switch, and did so at a blazing 60fps.

My personal favorite is the Decima Engine. The Horizon games and Death Stranding look amazing. Characters in FW are incredible and the Chapter 3 area in Death Stranding is my all time favorite map to explore.

My thoughts...

Engines I like:

iD Tech - Very stunning engine and extremely performant, Doom Eternal runs and looks great.
Variants of this engine and it's technology tend to underpin engines found in Call of Duty, Half Life and more.

Frostbite. - Another stunning engine which really pioneered deferred rendering in a massive way, may have been built with 7th gen hardware in mind but it has scaled upwards fantastically.

CryEngine - Technology and graphics at any cost.

****************
Engines I dislike:

Unreal Engine. - Shader compilation stutters, games tend to look "samey".

Creation Engine. - Although flexible with it's scripting, games built using it are extremely buggy and erratic.