It’s hard to believe that we live in a world where avid game players are aware of developers and game journalists like they’re rock stars.  Even stranger than that is we talk about things like game engines. 

Of course none is better known than Unreal Engine, the backbone of various modern games, like the Mass Effect series, Batman: Arkham Asylum, The Last Remnant, Borderlands, the upcoming Mortal Kombat, the BioShock series, Deus Ex, Red Steel, and Epic’s own Gears of War series.  Even 50 Cent:  Blood on the Sand is a UE game.  Along with such a large number of titles, the list of those who license UE is pretty long as well:  Activision, Capcom, Disney, Konami, 2K, Ubisoft, Sega, Sony, EA, Square Enix and many more.

A game engine is a set of tools that developers can use to essentially skip a step in the development process and have a more direct route to creating a game rather than worrying about building those tools themselves.  This allows for a quicker development cycle, which is good for business and good for those of us who love playing because it allows us to have more games more often.

But is it really good for us? Think about all those games listed above. Sure they might all be pretty different for the most part, and they all look different, but they also have sort of the same weird shiny polish on everything along with a similar feel to their controls.  Maybe it’s just me but you can almost put someone with any level of attention to detail in a room, have them play a number of games, and they should easily be able to tell what is running on UE and what isn’t. 

Along with that weird “shine” that everyone and everything has, all the controllable characters have the same “weight” to them as well.  Again, using our example of trapping someone in a room and having them play a number of games, if you quickly played some of those games back to back, they would almost feel the same too.  Think about moving around Shepard in Mass Effect, Batman in Arkham Asylum, Marcus in Gears of War, or, yes, even 50 Cent in his own masterpiece.  They all kind of feel the same.  Yes, they all have different moves and can perform different actions, but they all have that kind of heavy movement to them.  You can even notice it in Mortal Kombat Vs. DC Universe and the upcoming Mortal Kombat.

So are licensed game engines, in particular the widely used Unreal Engine, such a bad thing?  Honestly, I don’t think so.  Sure it kind of translates to games that are similar in various ways, but at the same time all those titles I listed above are extremely different too, and most of them pretty amazing.  BioShock and Mass Effect are two of the greatest games ever made in my opinion.  Even Blood on the Sand has a button that lets you curse.

It’s hard to imagine that some of those games would be out by this point, or at all, if licensed game engines didn’t exist.  So as long as developers continue to modify these engines and remain creative in both gameplay and art style, I don’t see why using them is so bad.