14 DAY TRIAL // Every couple of years Electronic Arts decides to renew its graphical engine support and acquires a license for brand new video platform to massively use with its featured games. This Friday we've just witnessed such a change, as EA announced a deal for Epic's Unreal Engine 3 to support "several next-generation titles that are currently under development."
There are only words of praise from Paul Lee, president of EA studios: "At EA, we give our development teams the tools they need to make great games. We license cutting edge tools like the Unreal Engine 3 and combine them with our own systems to create state-of-the art development technology."
Mark Rein, Vice President, Epic Games, Inc commented: "We're obviously thrilled to license Unreal Engine 3 to EA, the world leader in our industry. They have extremely talented development teams, and we're excited to see how they apply our technology to their high profile game projects."
The Unreal Engine 3 capabilities are well known, a vast array of core technologies, content creation tools and infrastructure suited for developing next generation console games, as well as PC games. Considering the engine's success, it appears designers managed to reach the original goal of putting as much power as possible in the hands of artists with minimal programmer assistance. Content creation and programming is done with ease within the highly modular framework, suitable for building and testing a wide range of game genres.
This license comes to supplement and effectively replace the now obsolete Criterion's RenderWare tech since, at some point, one every four games supported the engine. No further details were revealed concerning the upcoming EA titles to take advantage of Unreal Engine 3 capabilities. We can only expect the best, considering Microsoft Game Studios, Atari, Real Time Worlds, Namco, Midway, Silicon Knights, VU Games, THQ, Sony Online, and Epic's own Xbox 360 title Gears of War already put the platform to good use.