Mr eel
OMFG, They’re Selling This? The Unreal 3 Engine looks Dodgy to Me
So I recently finished Gears of War. While running through the game, I noticed quite a few graphical glitches. Textures would flicker to black as the characters and scenery moved. I reflexively thought this was the Xbox 360’s GPU going to mush — they have a reputation for this apparently — and was feeling a bit anxious about sending it off for a warranty repair, especially considering I’d just bought the bastard thing.
Well! Turns out it’s not the hardware at all, but rather the Unreal 3 engine used in the game. I was able to confirm this while playing Mass Effect earlier today. It also displays the same errors, as it also uses the U3 engine. I also had a quick spin of Forza 2, which while being a stupid boring car game — I got it free, meh — at least didn’t have any graphical errors.
This according to the internets has been confirmed as an issue with the engine itself.
It’s really bad in Mass Effect. Really bad. Even looking in the stat-screens — which displays no scenery — character models are marred by this constant flickering. It strange because the U3 engine is otherwise beautiful, with fantastic lighting and a huge draw distance.
I’m a little bit gobsmacked at the idea that a finalised, released game has such obvious errors. I was also interested to note that the videos demonstrating the game lacked these errors. Mmmmm, yes very interesting. How very helpful of Bioware — and by extension Epic Games — to vaunt the quality of the graphics while neglecting to actually make sure things worked properly. That is false advertising.
I put down good money for that game, I expect it to work properly. If there is a patch that fixes the error I might be mollified, but otherwise I’m considering returning the game.
Seriously, what a dodgy bunch they are — Bioware and Epic both.
Comments
notheory on January 2, 2008
It’s worse than that.
I found a glitch in Mass Effect (awesome game btw), that wedges the game into a state where you can’t do anything, can’t pause to access the menus, and are there-by stuck quitting the game all together, or resetting the xbox.
SPOILER:
It takes place when you fight Benezia. If you get hit with a biotic immediately prior to Benezia calling in reinforcements, then the script that your character model is supposed to perform gets halted for the cut scene, but never continues once the cut scene is over.
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That said, Bioware’s focus has always been interactive story telling, and they’re the best at it, so i cut them some slack. The Knights of the Old Republic games (which are awesome as well, and you should play them) also had one or two similar glitches in them as well that would do similar things. These games are huge undertakings, so i cut them some slack. That said, the item management system in Mass Effect is so bad that it’s effectively broken. All i can figure is that their testing regimen focused on story elements and not the nitty gritty stuff that everyone has to do.