EA Licenses Unreal Engine for Five New Titles

Following the declarations made earlier this year regarding better quality games to be released by Electronic Arts, things are finally starting to move in the right direction. First, EA decided to open a game development studio in Romania, then a few original IPs were announced and now, we have word that Electronic Arts has extended their agreement to use the Unreal Engine 3. This means that, at least visually, we should get some great new titles in the future.

EA's original Unreal Engine 3 agreement was signed back in 2006 and important cross-platform games hit the store shelves: Medal of Honor Airborne and Army of Two. This extended deal allows the giants to incorporate the Unreal Engine in more than five titles currently under development. Of course, as usual, details regarding the titles are not available, but just the number alone is enough to get us a little excited about what's going to come from EA.

"With the largest and most talented studio operation in the world, it's critical for us to give our studio teams the best tools they need to make great games," said Frank Gibeau, President, EA. "This agreement reflects our commitment to Epic's technology which, in combination with our own cutting-edge systems, allows us to create ground breaking hits."

The Unreal Engine 3 is a complete game development framework for next-generation consoles and DirectX10-equipped PCs, providing the vast array of core technologies, content creation tools, and support infrastructure required by game developers. Every aspect of the Unreal Engine has been designed with ease of content creation in mind, with the goal of putting as much power as possible in the hands of artists and designers to develop assets in a visual environment with minimal assistance, and to give programmers a highly modular, scalable, extensible framework for building, testing, and shipping games in a wide range of genres. It's not that EA doesn't have people skilled enough to do that kind of work, but there's no reason in changing something that works great. Now, we can only wonder what Unreal Engine-based titles is Electronic Arts working on.