Today Silicon Knights, the development team behind the original Legacy of Kane, Eternal Darkness, and the upcoming Too Human title, has file a lawsuit against Epic games because of their Unreal 3 Engine. According to the suit they have failed to provide a working game engine which they paid over $75,000 for.
Silicon Knights claims that Gears of War used a superior version of the Unreal 3 with a half-assed copy sent to Silicon Knights amongst other developers. An adequate, working version of the engine was not made until Epic altered the engine for Gears of war, a version they failed to release to other license holders such as Silicon Knights. Furthermore the suit claims that, after Silicon Knights had numerous problems with the engine Epic games failed to fix the engine, and were unwilling to do so. They had tried, for a year’s time, to resolve the issue with Epic games, but because of Epic games they have had to indeed file a lawsuit.
Silicon Knights has since abandoned the Unreal 3 engine to develop their own engine for Too Human. The title is still tentatively scheduled for release later this year on the 360.
[via GameDaily]
Kind of explains why Too Human wasn’t shown off at E3. I can’t imagine that it’s possible for Too Human to ship this year…
Well yeah, partially. They chose not to show it off at the E3 because they just felt it wasn’t ready for more public ridicule, this likely due to one of two reasons. The Unreal 3 engine still caused the frame rate issues and other problems that we saw at last year’s E3. The other possibility is that their newly built engine has a lot of bugs to work out before it’s ready for public appearance.
As for the release date, it’s hard to say. The title was mentioned at the MS press conference, which suggests that it’s planned to come out this year as the only title that was mentioned not to come out this year out of the shown 360 titles was Resident Evil 5… but yeah it doesn’t seem entirely possible.
I find it sad news, since the Unreal line of engines have been my favourites. They’re versatile, very moddable, kickass in general. I’m with Epic on this one.
Well then, it’s not just Silicon Knights. Koei’s having problems too. One can only wonder how long until companies like Capcom, EA, SquareEnix and Sega go forth and claim problems too.
For all developers using the Unreal 3 Tech…beware. SK is very likely to win this case, and damages are likely to be 3x. I’ve taken a keen interest in this issue and read the claim by SK. I believe they have a very strong case and are likely to win by jury. This probably means that if its not settled out of court, Epic is dead. So, do you really want to use their engine on your next project ? They were not there for SK in terms of support, and are likely not to be there at all for you. Go and find another engine company. Until this dust settles, stay away from Epic. Your project and job is at stake