Midway's Unreal Engine 3 Woes

Midway: What went wrong on Variety.com is an interesting analysis of the
perpetually troubled game producer, where interviewing some ex-employees throws
some blame at the decision to license the Unreal Engine 3 for the company's woes
(thanks
BeyondUnreal):"The mistake we made was, instead of just taking the
base Unreal 3 engine that 'Gears of War' was made on and building games off of
that, we let our tech and product development guys try to really modify the
engine to add all these diff things," one ex-employee told me. "It was a ton of
new technology which they just weren’t capable of doing. It put all the games
way behind schedule."

Even though Midway invested millions in building a common tech base for all its
studios, apparently they all had to adapt UE3 for each project, which meant they
couldn't share resources in a timely manner, so none of the promised benefits
materialized. Making the code work for PS3 was particularly hard, sources said,
and so games just weren't coming out. Look at the first half of 2007, when all
Midway shipped was "Lord of the Rings Online" for Turbine, or the first half of
this year, when all it shipped was "Unreal Tournament III" for Epic.


Note: This article has been bookmarked by a user. Please visit the source website for the complete article.