TinCow
10-17-2008, 18:08
I made a disparaging comment about Bioware's Aurora engine in the Gaming News thread. That got me thinking about game engines in general and I thought it would be interesting to discuss them. So, the question is: what are the best game engines of all time?
Feel free to define 'best' however you want. My personal nominees are:
Infinity Engine - Bioware's engine for the Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and PST games. This is one of my favorite engines of all time due to its great appearance and ease of use. D&D games have always posed problems for game engines due to the extremely large rule sets involved. While the manuals for these games were invariably massive, the interfaces themselves were relatively simple. They allowed for easy access to all necessary information and commands without cluttering up the screen or requiring more than a couple clicks. They also provided for excellent RPG interaction, as well as extremely good tactical fights. Top it off with some of the best 2D graphics ever made, which still look decent on modern computers if run with a high resolution mod.
Quake I Engine - A technically revolutionary engine, which was responsible for a massive increase in the visual quality of FPS games. The basic concepts were so good that it has been continually improved and refined through further versions and is directly responsible for a sizable chunk of all FPS games ever released. Significantly, this includes all iD and Valve games, whose later games were all directly based on improved versions and evolutions of the Quake I engine. Yes, even the Doom 3 and Source engines built off of the foundations of the Quake I engine. The Unreal engine is about the only thing that can even compare to the Quake I Engine in terms of impact, IMO.
Gamebryo Engine - This wins the versatility award. I'm not quite sure how this engine manages to do what it does, but according to wikipedia, it is responsible for first person games like Oblivion and Fallout 3, top-down strategy games like Civ IV and Empire Earth II, and even MMORPGs like DAOC and Warhammer Online. Whoever programmed this thing must be a genius, because that's some absurd flexibility.
Feel free to define 'best' however you want. My personal nominees are:
Infinity Engine - Bioware's engine for the Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and PST games. This is one of my favorite engines of all time due to its great appearance and ease of use. D&D games have always posed problems for game engines due to the extremely large rule sets involved. While the manuals for these games were invariably massive, the interfaces themselves were relatively simple. They allowed for easy access to all necessary information and commands without cluttering up the screen or requiring more than a couple clicks. They also provided for excellent RPG interaction, as well as extremely good tactical fights. Top it off with some of the best 2D graphics ever made, which still look decent on modern computers if run with a high resolution mod.
Quake I Engine - A technically revolutionary engine, which was responsible for a massive increase in the visual quality of FPS games. The basic concepts were so good that it has been continually improved and refined through further versions and is directly responsible for a sizable chunk of all FPS games ever released. Significantly, this includes all iD and Valve games, whose later games were all directly based on improved versions and evolutions of the Quake I engine. Yes, even the Doom 3 and Source engines built off of the foundations of the Quake I engine. The Unreal engine is about the only thing that can even compare to the Quake I Engine in terms of impact, IMO.
Gamebryo Engine - This wins the versatility award. I'm not quite sure how this engine manages to do what it does, but according to wikipedia, it is responsible for first person games like Oblivion and Fallout 3, top-down strategy games like Civ IV and Empire Earth II, and even MMORPGs like DAOC and Warhammer Online. Whoever programmed this thing must be a genius, because that's some absurd flexibility.