Unreal Engine 4 for great justice

Borderlands 1 and 2, Mass Effect 2 and 3, Batman: Arkham City and Asylum, Gears of War … What do all these games have in common? The Unreal engine that runs them, of course. The beloved engine that has been powering blockbusters on the PC, consoles and now handheld devices is making the leap into the future with the release of Unreal Engine 4, and it sounds better than ever.

The brainchild of Tim Sweeney and the team at Epic is sure to push the limits of computer and console hardware for years to come.  Perhaps the greatest part of the leap into UE4 is the improvement to the realm of development. Development times for major projects and titles will be cut nearly in half, according to Wired.com’s Stu Horvath. Epic’s goal is to deliver more eye candy at a cheaper cost to developers.

Why should you be excited about this? Aside from the simple fact that making a game like Skyrim look even more realistic with particle effects, water flow, and true-to-life environmental reaction to light, it keeps developers from settling for “safe” and profitable games. With UE4, a smaller developer might be more open to the idea of once-risky visually demanding titles that carried higher development costs with it. Now, we know graphics don’t make the game, but you’d be hard pressed to argue against leaps in development (and their results) like this.

Wired’s writeup on the new technology is worth the read. A preview below:

After the cinematic, Epic’s senior technical artist, Alan Willard, starts playing the demo. At this point the view switches to that disembodied first-person perspective made so ubiquitous by shooting games like the Call of Duty franchise and Epic’s own influential Unreal titles. Willard maneuvers his avatar into a dimly lit room where a flashlight turns on, revealing eddies of dust—thousands of floating particles that were invisible until exposed. In another room, globes of various sizes float in the air. Willard rolls a light-emanating orb along the floor (think of a spherical flashlight that rolls like a bowling ball) and beams of light wobble and change direction, illuminating parts of the room and revealing the clusters of floating spheres with a kind of strobe effect. At first it all seems perfectly familiar: “Well, yeah,” you think, “that’s how they’d act in the real world. What’s the big deal?” But it is a big deal: This is stuff that videogames have never been able to simulate—the effects simply aren’t possible on today’s consoles.