Digital Extremes Weighs In On Unreal Engine 3 for PS3

Digital Extremes’ Steve Sinclair, game director on the forthcoming Dark Sector, has spoken out against the company’s long time partners Epic Games, with further criticism of the Unreal Engine 3 middleware. Canadian developer Digital Extremes have been long time partners of Epic Games, co-developing the original 1998 Unreal game and the subsequent Unreal Tournament titles for PC and console. With Dark Sector, though, the company has elected to develop its own proprietary graphics engine, rather than using Unreal Engine 3. Speaking in a new interview with consumer website Gameplayer, Sinclair commented that: “A lot of promises were made about the Unreal III engine [sic], particularly on PS3. But as we see now, the time frames haven’t been met and now a lot of games using it are being held up.” Public criticism of Unreal Engine 3 began last month with Too Human developer Silicon Knights filing a lawsuit against creators Epic Games, claiming that they were “sabotaging” the efforts of Silicon Knights and others to develop their own games while using licensing fees from the middleware to fund the creation of Gears Of War. In response Epic Games issued a countersuit against Silicon Knights. [UPDATE: Digital Extremes PR director Meridith Braun has sent Gamasutra a statement clarifying the company's stance on the engine and its relationship with Epic Games. "As long time partners of Epic Games, we have nothing but respect for what they’ve done with their engine and the huge success of Gears of War. We have many friends at Epic and still have a great relationship with them. The truth of the matter, is that, Unreal Engine 3 didn’t exist when we started developing Dark Sector. We had some great ideas for the next-gen consoles coming out and these ideas quickly turned into a whole development environment that revolves around the Evolution Engine now powering Dark Sector. Ultimately, it was the right decision for us to branch out with our own technology but we know that the Unreal Engine is a great engine and expect it will continue to power many great games in the future."]