Online games firm signs licensing deal for Epic's popular engine
NCsoft plans to build two new online titles using Epic's Unreal Engine 3.
The two firms have announced a licensing deal for the engine which discloses that NCsoft will gain access to all the latest updates to UE3 which make it "the best possible offering for cross-platform game development for years to come".
"Unreal Engine 3 has a well structured rendering pipeline, and its graphical quality is superb thanks to advanced lighting and shadowing systems," said Young-muk Choi, lead programmer, Development Unit, NCsoft.
"Tools within the Unreal Editor empower us to instantly produce and optimize our outputs, and we especially love how the engine enables designers to easily prototype concepts without the need for programming."
Jay Wilbur, vice president of Epic Games, added: "NCsoft pioneered online game development using Unreal Engine, as evidenced by Lineage II, one of the most commercially successful and enduringly popular online games in history.
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"We are thrilled to take this next step with NCsoft, and are fully committed to supporting their projects. We expect to be completely wowed by what they do with our latest technology.”"
Ureal engine is potentially fine with its toolsets and asset pipeline....
But from experience, if one is not careful...or in you are not on top of it, it can become way too heavy for use in a MMO. Unreal works fine for single play or limited multiplay designed projects BUT for it can be horrifyingly heavy when scaled up. Your network expenditure can become crushing....if you don't watch not only what you are doing wiht the engine but also how you structure your shards.
I'm sure NCsoft have some top class staff who will ensure it all works out. To be honest, any project could spiral out regardless of genre produced. Seeing as they have prior development experience they should manage just fine.
