- Anonymous101
- |
- Elder Legendary Member
- gamertag: [none]
- user homepage:
I love Bungie's proprietary engines. You might not have thought Halo 3 pushed any envelopes, but it did a TON more technically than most games today. Why? Because it was specifically molded around the Xbox 360 framework.
With Reach, a TON of money has already gone into research and development of the new proprietary engine that will power Reach. With what Bungie has been researching, and from what was displayed at Siggraph, Bungie definitely knows the limitations of console (in particular Xbox 360) hardware, and has put in a lot of effort into overcoming these boundaries and making a truly state of the art engine. Perhaps the "ReachAround" engine will feature such things as realtime direct light combined with pre-computed indirect lighting to create truly convincing indoor and outdoor scenarios. Innovations to the magnificent HDR and additions to the well crafted forge and threater modes are also to be expected.
But on to the topic at hand: Why would the Cryengine NOT be suitable for Halo: Reach? Well, it simply doesn't offer the level of depth needed to develop a game like Halo. What a game like Halo asks for is honestly more than what Cryengine could provide. I know that sounds crazy, but think about it. When you license an engine, all of the tools are given to you. You just have to sculpt the game around these tools. Because of the amazingly broad potential of Cryengine three, that doesn't sound too bad at all. In fact, Cryengine 3 is amazing in it's own respects. However, lack of creativity in the design of the engine is the problem. Halo has always had it's own personality and style, and using the Cryengine would definitely stifle the amount of creativity put into the visuals. CryEngine 3 games will all end up looking very similar to each other, the same way games powered by Unreal III would. Finally, CryEngine, though built to work cleanly on all platforms, isn't specifically optimized for the platform of choice the way an engine like Halo 3's is built to take advantage of the 360 hardware.
Bungie knows what they want to do with the technology and art of Halo: Reach, and I believe that they really should do things their way, the tried and true way they've been following since way back when.