The Unreal 3 engine is quickly becoming the preferred base on which to build a number of games, from the traditional First-Person Shooters to third-person shooter, MMOs and even social communities. The main reason is that the engine provides great visuals while also balancing system requirements for the games based on it. And there are the console optimizations that Epic talks so much about, which provide a coherent toolset needed to program complex graphics for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Bluehole Studio Inc. is the latest company to license the Unreal 3 game engine for its development process. Bluehole is based in Seoul, South Korea and it's a young company, having been founded only one year ago, in March 2007. The employees are mainly drawn from the local gaming community, with some seasoned managers at the helm. Their aim is no less than revolutionizing the MMO genre with their games.

Rather than creating a game engine from scratch, which could take years of work and could produce unsatisfying results, the team decided to use the already popular Unreal 3 engine to free up more time and more resources which can be used on other aspects of the MMO they are developing, called Project S1. Yong-hyun Park, who is chief technical officer of Bluehole, said: "At Bluehole Studio, we are striving to advance the MMORPG industry by leveraging high quality graphics. Thus, we are very pleased to collaborate with Epic, because Unreal Engine 3 is the best choice for our development framework."

Jay Wilbur, who is vice president at Epic Games, was also pleased by the license agreement and said: "Given Bluehole's pedigree and its ambitious plans to reinvent MMO design and battle system mechanics, Epic is honored to provide the core development tools and infrastructure for this project."

The Korean company plans to create a MMO that focuses on player experience by creating the whole world based on the players' actions rather than the other way around.