I was wondering today about the engine used in Call of Duty. It turns out the engine, IW Engine, made its debute back in 2005 with Call of Duty 2.
Since that time, it's been used in six Call of Duty games: 2, MW, WaW, MW2, BlOps, and now MW3. Besides Call of Duty, it also was used in two other notable games, Quantum of Solace and the GoldenEye remake. There could be more, but I'm just using Wikipedia for quick reference.
This is something I often see the Call of Duty franchise criticized for. Now, to put this into perspective, I decided to look up another engine, Source.
The Source Engine made it's debute a year earlier, in 2004. The list of games made just by Valve is actually larger: Half-Life 2, Portal, Portal 2, Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike Source, Day of Defeat Source, Alien Swarm, and the new Defense of the Ancients coming out. That's 10 games.
Besides work by Valve, the most notable game running on the Source Engine is Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. However, the list of games provided by Wikipedia also name 17 other games.
My question is this then, why is Call of Duty called out so often for using a six year old engine, yet Valve is allowed to still use a seven year old engine upon which they built more games? Is Wikipedia factually incorrect in this regard? What should an engine be judged on to make it unacceptable to use one for a shorter amount of time than another and to make less games with it?
And related to this, why must a sequel of a game be graphically superior to its predecessors? Is it acceptable to say that one expects game within a common series to share the same aesthetics?
Source
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IW_Engine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_engine
Since that time, it's been used in six Call of Duty games: 2, MW, WaW, MW2, BlOps, and now MW3. Besides Call of Duty, it also was used in two other notable games, Quantum of Solace and the GoldenEye remake. There could be more, but I'm just using Wikipedia for quick reference.
This is something I often see the Call of Duty franchise criticized for. Now, to put this into perspective, I decided to look up another engine, Source.
The Source Engine made it's debute a year earlier, in 2004. The list of games made just by Valve is actually larger: Half-Life 2, Portal, Portal 2, Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike Source, Day of Defeat Source, Alien Swarm, and the new Defense of the Ancients coming out. That's 10 games.
Besides work by Valve, the most notable game running on the Source Engine is Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. However, the list of games provided by Wikipedia also name 17 other games.
My question is this then, why is Call of Duty called out so often for using a six year old engine, yet Valve is allowed to still use a seven year old engine upon which they built more games? Is Wikipedia factually incorrect in this regard? What should an engine be judged on to make it unacceptable to use one for a shorter amount of time than another and to make less games with it?
And related to this, why must a sequel of a game be graphically superior to its predecessors? Is it acceptable to say that one expects game within a common series to share the same aesthetics?
Source
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IW_Engine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_engine