Support NeoGAF

[Deleted member 325805]

I was just thinking about this while playing Wolfenstein and getting some texture pop in which is apparently due to the ID engine. Examples of games that use the engines would be fun as well.

 

[Cartho]

ID tech 6 (or whatever the one powering Doom is) is pretty flipping amazing. Runs like butter and looks darned pretty to boot. I feel like Cry Engine probably deserves some mention for sheer prettiness. In fact there are a lot of engines which come to mind. The Source engine is pretty incredible for its flexibility - I mean it's (HEAVILY modified) Source tech powering Titanfall 2. That's strong for an engine which was cutting edge when Half Life 2 came out, many moons ago.

Worst engine? Gamebryo. Fuck Gamebryo.

 

[roytheone]

Source engine is the best one I have ever seen. Half life 2 was light years ahead of the competition and still ran well on older pc's.

 

[Trace]

Assuming we're only talking modern engines, I'd say Cryengine/Unreal 4/Id Tech 6 are top of the pack.

Worst would be Creation engine/Unity.

 

[Grim Patron]

I'll talk just wrt Beth. Best id tech 6. Worst whatever BGS uses.

 

[IcyRhythms]

Source, idTech6, and Frostbite.

 

[Jonneh3003]

I love the Nintendo Land engine also used for Splatoon (and Mario Kart 8?). The lighting capabilities are stunning.

 

[Prophet Steve]

Probably the ones that developers work the easiest with and can't really be judged by most GAF members.

 

[Flux]

idTech is great at visuals and very impressive across all hardware.
There's probably worse out there, but Gamebryo is the worst engine with consistent use in major studio/budget games like Fallout and Skyrim.

 

[HotHamBoy]

That Tell Tale engine seems kinda sloppy.

Untiy consistently runs like shit on most platforms. PS4 ports have problems and all the Unity games on my Gear VR are on the struggle bus.

Hmm. Gamebryo, yeah. Hot garbage, that one.

 

[Megalo]

Worst engine? Gamebryo. Fuck Gamebryo.

This. What a mess this engine is. It makes me sad because with a better and more modern engine Bethesda could do wonders ! I hope they will use something else for the next TES/Fallout. I mean, they have to !

Unreal Engine 4 is really powerful and user friendly.
It's in-house but the Naughty Dog's engine is doing a lot of really nice things too.

 

[Ashtar]

I'll talk just wrt Beth. Best id tech 6. Worst whatever BGS uses.

Gamebryo if I'm not mistaken
IDtech 6 is pretty great has some pop in but ran smoothly on my ps4 (did have tiny drops though)

 

[Duxxy3]

Quake 3 engine the best.

Not sure who I'd put as worst.

 

[Cranster]

The Halo engines. More specifically the Halo 3 Engine, Halo Reach engine and Halo 5 engine.

 

[QuantumSquid]

idTech 6, the engine the new DOOM runs on, is amazing. Incredibly high framerates, very little screen tearing even with VSync off, and it makes it easy for games to look really, really good.

 

[Cormano]

Source engine is the best one I have ever seen. Half life 2 was light years ahead of the competition and still ran well on older pc's.

Although I agree with you, I personally think Goldsrc was better overall, so many mods and tweaks came out back then.

 

[WickedLaharl]

Luminous Engine from Square Enix has been a disaster

Thank goodness KH3 is using UE4

 

[The Albatross]

EASport's Ignite engine sits squarely in the middle of everything. Cool that it can be the foundation of so many games, but doesn't do any of them supremely well.

 

[The Dear Leader]

Fox Engine, idTech 6 and 4A Games Engine are a few great ones off the top of my head.

 

[KiN0]

Luminous Engine from Square Enix has been a disaster

Thank goodness KH3 is using UE4

Wasn't crystal tools disastrous as well? When was the last time SE had a well functioning engine?

 

[LelouchZero]

Some of the best engines are the Frostbite Engine, CryEngine, Unreal Engine 3 and 4 and Naughty Dog's game engine.

Too much people have been hating on Unity because it tends runs like crap on the consoles, it's a real shame.

They have been improving the multi-threading capabilities of the game engine quite a lot recently with the newer versions of it though.

It's an okay game engine and it works pretty well for indie developers.

 

[Haunted]

I dislike Gamebryo.


I've heard lots of developer complaints about Unity, though I find it hard to hate an engine that can produce a beauty like Ori and the Blind Forest.

 

[warheat]

Best : Unreal/Fox/Source/Frostbite

Worst : GameByro or whatever they call it these days.

 

[bloodforge]

There is nothing wrong with Gamebryo, lots of games use it with zero issue, it's just Bethesda's implementation of it that sucks.

 

[Prophet Steve]

Too much people have been hating on Unity because it tends runs like crap on the consoles, it's a real shame.

They have been improving the multi-threading capabilities of the game engine quite a lot recently with the newer versions of it though.

It's an okay game engine and it works pretty well for indie developers.

I don't think it is bad either. It has a bunch of quirks for a developer, but it is easy to work with and because of the huge community has a lot of support. The performance thing doesn't seem inherent to Unity as The Lab from Valve is also made almost entirely in Unity (except for Robot Repair). Now they have made a bunch of rendering changes, but they made those available to all the developers too.

 

[Elitist1945]

Worst: Gamebryo

Best: Unreal Engine, Naughty Dog Engine, Frostbite

 

[Technosteve]

Id tech 5 and gamebryo are two of the worst engines. Rage cant run on my graphics card due to overhead for texture steaming. Gamebryo just has memory leaks and jank

 

[Auctopus]

Best: Fox, Source and whatever Sony's ICE Engine is doing.

Worst: Gamebryo and at points, Unity.

 

[Arkanius]

Fox Engine. The engine that died too soon.

 

[Aters]

Probably the ones that developers work the easiest with and can't really be judged by most GAF members.

This.
I do someone who has been worked with different engines and she thought CryEngine is great.

 

[Glowsquid]

Best: Pie in the Sky

 

[TheDinoman]

I always felt Source kinda sucked for multiplayer games like TF2. Hit detection for stuff like melee weapons was fucked.

 

[SmartWaffles]

Assuming we're only talking modern engines, I'd say Cryengine/Unreal 4/Id Tech 6 are top of the pack.

Worst would be Creation engine/Unity.

CryEngine is hard to work well on consoles and is a bit harder to work with, and yeah Unity mostly doesn't work well on consoles at all, it is simply not built for bigger titles.

 

[Gentleman Jack]

I think the question would feel better if it at least laid down a baseline of what is being judged. Engines are toolsets, and those toolsets are good or bad from a developer's perspective depending on a set of criteria that no outside observer (i.e. 90% of consumers) is going to understand.

Now if we want to judge which engines have produced consistently high-performing games with impressive results, how much of that can be put down to the engine, rather than the unique optimizations that every modern production has to introduce to make it run on the targeted hardware?

Without a sensible guideline this conversation risks just being 'this game performed poorly therefore the engine is to blame' for a while.

 

[SOR5]

Frostbite and Fox Engine have been magical

 

[Xyphie]

Out of high profile games I'd say Starcraft 2 (and by extension Heroes) and Diablo 3 both have pretty bad engines with weird performance issues.

 

[Crimsonclaw111]

Fox Engine. The engine that died too soon.

Forever powering pachinko machines.

I nominate MT Frameworks as best, the engine was insane and ran well on all kinds of hardware.

 

[SmartWaffles]

Out of high profile games I'd say Starcraft 2 (and by extension Heroes) and Diablo 3 both have pretty bad engines with weird performance issues.

This, especially Starcraft 2 and Heroes of the Storm, the framepacing is really really bad and multi-thread performance is abysmal.

 

[MrCunningham]

Source engine is the best one I have ever seen. Half life 2 was light years ahead of the competition and still ran well on older pc's.

It ran well on older PC's up to the point where Valve decided to completely change the lighting engine. But after that, it ran like garbage on older machines.

 

[Nachtfalke]

I'm really not a fan of the Unity engine. Bad performance and for some reason most games with this engine look somehow not appealing to me. They look rough.

 

[Saven]

Best: Fox Engine, Unreal 4, Source

Worst: Luminous from the looks of things or Gamebryo

 

[Rymuth]

Best: MT Framework - scaled up nicely on PC and is still chugging along after all these years, Capcom got their investment back and then some.

Worst: Gamebryo - fuck that hot mess.

 

[Glass Shark]

idTech 6 and Source. I was also super impressed with Fox Engine, it's a shame that probably won't go anywhere now.

 

[Angel_DvA]

Fox Engine and Frosbite are the best, Unity the worst.

 

[NightShift]

The Fox engine saved my PS4 from getting infected with FOXDIE, nothing can beat that. Thanks Fox engine!

I pick Telltale's engine for the worst. It's a big part of the reason why I'm not really into their games anymore.

 

[vkris]

Source engine is the best one I have ever seen. Half life 2 was light years ahead of the competition and still ran well on older pc's.

lol? Is this a Pokemon Red/Blue reference?

Source pisses me off nowadays. Feels clunky. I hate getting caught on walls when I just barely touch them when trying to cut corners. The UI hurts my eyes as well.
That all being said, it's not like I don't recognize how awesome it was when it came out, but in 2016 well... Source 2 please.

My favorite semi-recent was Halo2-4 and Halo5's engines. Halo 1 always felt clunky, but overtime they really polished it up. I think H5 is on a new engine but could be wrong there. Besides those, Smash Bros. engine is pretty solid, most of the time.

 

[sjay1994]

Recently

Best : fox engine. Open world at 60fps is sex

Worst: Id tech 5. Every game I've played using that engine has horrible performance issues.

 

[shintoki]

If we are going with best and worst engines.

Best engine has to be ID Tech 3(Quake 3 Engine), Quake 3 Arena, COD, Jedi Knight II. - In terms of versatility, it's really only a choice between this and the Unreal.

Worst has to be the Aurora Engine, KOTOR, Witcher, NWN - Even now, most of the games still run like a piece of shit, have horrendous loading times, glitchy to all hell. The engine was glue and taped together.

For current engines. Frostbite seems to be the best at the versatility aspect. It can look great, run at 60, destruction, etc. Worst is the piece of shit that replaced Aurora, Gamebyro.

 

[Chubby Rain]

Fox Engine. The engine that died too soon.

Oh don't worry, the engine is still being used.

 

[MattXIII]

Capcom's MT Framework is the unsung hero of gen 7

Great performance and across multiple devices