This helps them avoid ‘feature atrophy’ as everything they put in are features they ”utilise every day.” The engine team won’t ”build something we don’t use.”
”Our games really drive our engine development. That’s one of the reasons why we always built the engine based on what our needs were with the game,” explained Fergusson. Their own ambition for a videogames project is what shapes the future of Unreal Engine.
”So basically we were of the opinion that if we have a part of the engine that we don’t use, then it’s not going to get exposure, it’s not going to get tested and it’s going to atrophy. And so we don’t do that. The features in the engine are the features we utilise every day so they’re being tested every day and approved every day.”
”So that’s something we really focus on. So it really is a relationship with the engine team. We have desires about what we want to do to push the visuals of the game – certain things we want to do with lighting and shadows, those sorts of things,” he continued.
”And they rise to the challenge, and at the same time, to be competitive, they’re like, ‘this is a really cool feature that our engine has.’ So we look at the best way to utilise that. We’ll have moments where we say, ‘here’s a really cool feature, though we would never use it in any of our games’. And they go, ‘well, I guess we’re not doing it then.”
”We don’t want to build something we don’t use.” Check out the full interview between Gears of War 3 executive producer Rod Fergusson and Edge. Should Epic Games get off their developer can and start the Unreal Tournament series again?
