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Epic 'Defrauded' Developers with Unreal Engine, Says Silicon Knights
by Aaron Linde, Aug 18, 2008 3:50pm PDTSilicon Knights president and founder Denis Dyack commented on the legal struggle between the Too Human (360) and Unreal Engine purveyors Epic Games, expressing optimism that "justice will be done" in the ongoing court battle.
"The trial is proceeding," Dyack told Develop. "We feel really good about our claims, and we're hopeful that justice will be done. We all feel really strongly that they have defrauded us, and a major portion of the industry."
The dispute centers around Silicon Knights' claim that Epic held off on delivering promised features in its Unreal Engine 3 middleware in order to focus on its own UE3-powered effort, Gears of War (PC, 360).
The case went to trial following the denial of Epic's filing to dismiss the suit, and multiple licensees of the software have since been served with subpoenas in an effort to obtain evidence for the court battle.
"The Too Human you see today only really started development when [Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes (GCN)] was completed," Dyack explained. "So it's been a four-year development cycle and it would have been out even quicker, but we had to re-write the engine because of all the Epic stuff."
The first of a planned trilogy, the oft-delayed Too Human will finally reach retailers this coming Wednesday.
Comments
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Frankly, Silicon Knights isn't much of a player in the game industry. Their best games only (probably) have had modest sales, they lost their only "good" IP (Blood Omen, though I think Crystal Dynamics did Soul Reaver better than Blood Omen), and what else? They whine? That's not much to add to your resume.
I think 3D Realms has put out more games than SK in the past decade :p
Also, I'd like to know why Silicon Knights is expanding the number of employees at their office. A small team of 5-8 people can pull off an awesome UE3 game (or several), but 150 people at Silicon Knights can't even get one out the door? I think there are some serious problems there.
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I've got three AAA games that use Unreal tech on my HD at the moment.....Frontlines, MoH: Aitborne and Ghost Recon AW2. All 3 pretty much run like shit. While my rig isn't top of the line it IS way more than adequate to run all 3 on high settings.
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In reality, the only thing you might get out of any middleware is a shorter dev cycle, BUT only if you still have a strong team making the game. In other words, unless you have the team that could write the middleware anyway if they had more time, you're never going to ship anything good. Without knowing how the tools work, and understanding how to customize them to your devteam, you're fucked anyway.
SK believed the hype, and Epic delivered the usual: a pile of maybe vaguely useful code along with crazy tools.
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It's a bit dicy to sell your tech to competitors while you still have your own high profile games to get out. Where do you decide to draw the line between game specific code and engine code? I mean how do you decide if "John" should go work on engine code to benefit the engine, or if he should go work on code for the game? Epic seems to have gone for the latter option a bit too often which leaves licensees with crappy unfinished tech.
We have shared tech in house, and we occasionally license it to other studios, but we don't whore ourselves out to everyone with spare change for this very reason. If we can't support a licensee (due to lack of resources, or being busy with our own games etc.) then they won't get a license.
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The bottom line with the lawsuit is that the developers pleaded and begged with Epic to provide a patch for the busted camera rendering engine that would provide for intuitive real-time third-person camera controls.
Epic refused. Silicon Knights was left with no choice but to scrap their current code buy an enterprise camera license using the Mario 64 engine.
True Fucking Story.
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Maybe the full game is better, but my god the demo sucks.
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If it's epic's fault for some of the problems with Too Human, and Too Human doesn't sell well, could we say that Too Human was an *epic fail*? =p
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Good luck to them.
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