Does the engine make the game?

Technology and Gaming
#1

It was suggested yesterday on these forums that certain engines might suit different games better. Do you thing that Half Life 2 could have worked on the CryEngine 3? Bioshock on the source engine? Games like Crysis, which I think rely on the graphics to bolster a somewhat lacking story running on an engine like Unreal?

What do you guys think?

#2

no dumbass, the developers do, and they make the engine too in most cases

#3

:facepalm:

#4

This did not warrant it’s own thread.

And stop making a big deal out of this topic.

#5

No, and:

#6

Well, not like it really DOES matter.

It does however affect how the game is percieved.

And like you say, Crysis on unreal, NO WAY IN HELL. For that matter, I didn’t even like crysis with the engine it already has.

Imagine Super Mario with Source. Would ya play it?
Mario is too retro for that!

Half-life 2 however, would totally do in the crysis engine in my opinion.

Conclusion - none, it’s a matter of opinion. Kind of.

#7
  1. this should have stayed in the “engine” topic…
  2. yes, the engine does make the game but not in the way that you see it. If a company makes a new game it has two choices: buy an engine or make it themselves. Depending on its price it could expand or shrink the overall budget for making the game itself. If a company decides to make their own engine then obvious costs appear, including the time that has to be spent to build it.
    On the other hand there’s “support”. If a company buys a game engine, they don’t necessarily know it well enough to start making the game. UE3 has a huge community now but a few years ago Epic was accused of not being particularly interested after selling the engine to some company (don’t remember which one or what game they were working on). And that was just the beginning, practically no community = no support = heavy time for devs…

So there are a lot of things that rely on the game engine, none of which you might see while playing it yourself.

What you probably meant was “do graphics define the game?”. And the answer is “no, it doesn’t”.

#8

Silicon Knights with Too Human. They should have realized that making a third person action game on an FPS/TPS engine wouldn’t be the same as making an FPS on an FPS engine. But they didn’t, and they bitched about it.

#9

IIRC, Valve took the Quake Engine and pretty much completely changed it to make GoldSrc. While its not really feasible for most developers to completely modify the engine they work with, I can imagine that most would simply pick the engine that did everything they want it to do and then just roll with it.

#10

Game developers either develop the engine to suit the game they are trying to make, or chose the best engine to use and modify. So more often than not, the game is suited to the engine.

Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.