Obviously, Unreal Engine 3 has been somewhat under fire since Silicon Knights filed their lawsuit alleging (more or less) that UE3 wasn’t what Epic had claimed it would be, and that it was significantly late to boot. Since then, Mark Rein, Vice President of Epic Games has been on a PR campaign of sorts, trying to shore up the image of UE3. The latest salvo in this campaign came a couple of days ago when Mark Rein took some time to pat his engine on the back while complementing Bioshock on its somewhat surprising success:
“The folks at 2K Boston and 2K Australia have done a really fantastic job with this game,” said Rein. “We like to think we set a high bar with our own games, but more importantly we give our licensees the opportunity to take what we’ve done and do something even better with it.
“We do everything we can to help our licensees achieve that. Our door is always open for licensees who want to come and talk with us about their experiences and let us give them the best advice we can on how to take the most advantage of our technology,” he said.
“Regardless of whether its developed by us or not, nothing would make me happier than to see our engine in the number one selling game of all time or the number one highest reviewed game of all time.
“There are a lot more great titles coming from our licensees as well and we’re very proud of what is being accomplished and the helping role we get to play in their success.”
And why wouldn’t Rein be thrilled? Bioshock is looking to be one of the best reviewed and critically received games of all time, and it’s got a fat Unreal Engine logo before you ever press start to play. Of course, there’s just one problem with Rein’s gloating: Bioshock wasn’t mainly developed with Unreal Engine 3.
AMN: Speaking of the graphics engine, it’s running on Unreal 2.5 right?
Ken: No, we’ve moved to Unreal 3, we’ve done a lot of modifications on top of it, all the water effects we’ve added, and we’ve added a lot of features like water….again we don’t build features just to have them, we build them to have an emotional resonance. The AI relationship with the characters is an emotional thing and with the gameplay, the water, we want to make you feel like the ocean is about to drown you, it’s drowning Rapture and as you’ll see in the demo, water is just coming into this place so we’ve hired a water programmer and water artist, just for this game, and they’re kicking ass and you’ve never seen water like this.
AMN: When did the change happen, the switch to UE3 happen?
Ken: A few months ago, I mean, technically, I think you misunderstand me on how this works, basically, we translated systems over and ported more systems over, but Unreal 3 has a lot of elements that 2.5 has, there’s a lot of marketing there, but we had a lot of benefits to that and we’re not using all of it, we’re using our own things, but we have a lot of benefits too.
What the original question was referring to was Irrational’s own heavily modified version of the Unreal Engine 2, more commonly known as the Vengeance engine. Irrational created this offshoot in preparation for Bioshock, and more or less worked out the kinks in S.W.A.T. 4. While Bioshock was still being conceived and developed with the Unreal Engine 2.5/Vengeance, Irrational brought on an additional programmer to develop and integrate an additional water physics system (which you’ll frequently hear Irrational head Ken Levine gushing about in commentary on earlier videos for the title. Pun not intended.). When the title was ported over to UE3, it was largely infrastructure and project management features within the development environment that Irrational took advantage of (according to the linked interview).
Oh, and did I mention the game missed its original Spring release date? Does that sound familiar?
The point here is that Bioshock’s success doesn’t reflect one way or the other on Epic. Not only that, it’s slightly greasy of Rein to immediately attach Epic’s name to the title in an attempt to sway public opinion. Or at least, I think so. What do you think? Does Bioshock’s success reflect well on UE3?
-Aegies
Does it reflect well for epic in public opinion yes. The logo is the most thought the general public will put into it. Though why he would engage in such a campaign is beyond me. The developers that have worked with it know the strengths and weaknesses of the engine and no amount of public support would turn developers to an unworkable product (if it was in fact so, i have no experience as a programmer).
As for how it relates to the pending lawsuit it has absolutely no direct relation. In contract law (as it relates to real property) the typical result is a settlement or renegotiation of terms based on verifiable proof of loss or incomplete product. This particular case is much harder to argue as it is based on a digital product and related tools so it is much harder to specifically inventory features as missing or incomplete.
In your article you allude to a possible defense mechanism by epic citing what would be considered “related goods” or a product produced by another company with the same tools. This is where the basis of the argument comes in , is the product a result of the tools given or merely a reflection of the artist’s ability with those tools.
As Irrational (im never gonna get used to calling them 2k) stated they used a large part of their own unique skillset and brought in tools from an existing version so the comparison is fairly weak and circumstantial at best.
While epic would argue that other clients seem satisfied with the product (heresay with no means of comparison) SK can cite releast date delays from numerous other companies (which would also be circumstantial).
In the end i think little will come of the lawsuit unless Silicon Knights can rally others to their cause (and some of their public comments seem intended to do so).