The IW Engine comapred to the Source Engine

Midnight Crossroads

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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
 

lllumpy

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It's probly just because everyone loves valve so much. Hopefully they're making episode 3 with source engine 2 which is why it's taking so long.
 

Radeonx

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Because there are tons and tons of Valve fanboys (Not that there aren't Call of Duty fanboys that say stupid shit) that consider Call of Duty to be below them and will not hesitate to trash anything related to Call of Duty.
They are the vocal minority, but they are still very vocal.

And there is constant work being done on the source engine.
 

Yureina

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I'd say it has something to do with the fact that Source games seem to look nicer and nicer with each new game, to the point that it makes one forget that the engine is 7 years old. Portal 2 may use the same engine as Half-Life 2, but it is pretty obvious that there have been considerable technical advancements in between that have made Portal 2 look quite pretty by today's standards (and to not be a system hog, yay! ^_^). On the other hand... CoD has pretty much looked about the same this whole time. Perhaps a few slight changes here and there, but... not very many.

In short.... the Source engine has evolved over time, and the games that use it have gotten prettier. But... not so much the case for CoD.
 

Worgen

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Whatever, just wash your hands.
because valve does stuff to mix up the gameplay and generally valve doenst get a free ride either, I havent seen a review for a source game that didnt have someone bitching about its graphics and saying the engine is showing its age

simply put the cod engine is only used for fps games, the source engine is mostly used for them but usually with different types of gameplay
 

Avatar Roku

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Honestly, I'd almost think the Unreal Engine might be a better comparison to the Source Engine than the IW Engine.
 

Johnnyallstar

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Source is on the downhill of it's life, but it's still a phenomenal engine, and it has things embedded in it that improve it beyond I.W. Engine.

As for aesthetics, I'd agree about 90%. Games of the same series don't need the same graphics, but they should usually share styles. But the quality of the graphics should be better than the predecessor because doesn't that show progress? Would you accept a game that was a sequel that had worse graphical fidelity than the original?

Notable differences in aesthetics include LoZ: Wind Waker, Mario 64, and Oblivion, which changed the aesthetics, but not necessarily better or worse, but had their own flavor in the series.

A lot of people hated LoZ: WW, but I really warmed up to the aesthetics once I got into it. Ocarina is still my favorite of the series, but the change in aesthetics wasn't horrible.
 

Midnight Crossroads

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GreatTeacherCAW said:
Isn't MW3 a new engine?

http://kotaku.com/5804735/the-maker-of-modern-warfare-3-has-moved-beyond-its-modern-warfare-2-tech
I believe it's using an upgraded version. From what I've read, IW Engine is on version 4.0, but what that means is a mystery to me. I can't find any really good information on the evolution of it.
 

s0m3th1ng

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And to put an even bigger point on all this...Source still has bits of code from the original Quake. Half-Life was just a heavily modified Quake 2 game.
 

Midnight Crossroads

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Avatar Roku said:
Honestly, I'd almost think the Unreal Engine might be a better comparison to the Source Engine than the IW Engine.
I mostly used Source because Valve is popular on this site, and they have quite similar origins. Although, I didn't know until now that all the Mass Effect games use Unreal 3. That seems to be the only consistent engine used by BioWare. Not even DAO and DA2 share the same one.
 

Avatar Roku

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Midnight Crossroads said:
Avatar Roku said:
Honestly, I'd almost think the Unreal Engine might be a better comparison to the Source Engine than the IW Engine.
I mostly used Source because Valve is popular on this site, and they have quite similar origins. Although, I didn't know until now that all the Mass Effect games use Unreal 3. That seems to be the only consistent engine used by BioWare. Not even DAO and DA2 share the same one.
You'd be surprised how many people use Unreal, EVERYONE seems to.
 

Midnight Crossroads

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Johnnyallstar said:
Source is on the downhill of it's life, but it's still a phenomenal engine, and it has things embedded in it that improve it beyond I.W. Engine.

As for aesthetics, I'd agree about 90%. Games of the same series don't need the same graphics, but they should usually share styles. But the quality of the graphics should be better than the predecessor because doesn't that show progress? Would you accept a game that was a sequel that had worse graphical fidelity than the original?

Notable differences in aesthetics include LoZ: Wind Waker, Mario 64, and Oblivion, which changed the aesthetics, but not necessarily better or worse, but had their own flavor in the series.

A lot of people hated LoZ: WW, but I really warmed up to the aesthetics once I got into it. Ocarina is still my favorite of the series, but the change in aesthetics wasn't horrible.
Graphical improvement does show progress, but I'm just not sure if its the progress that should be measured so much. We have great graphics now, and they're improving, but it's hard to show a massive improvement with the level of graphical quality today.
 

Dense_Electric

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It's not because IW uses the same engine, it's because the gameplay in every CoD game is EXACTLY the same. By contrast, if you're going to tell me that the gameplay of Portal and Team Fortress 2 are anywhere near similar I'm going to have to ask you to step outside. Even Half-Life 2 and Left 4 Dead, both fairly generic FPS's in terms of gameplay, feel different. CoD4 feels identical to MW2 or BlOps, hence why IW gets called out while Valve doesn't.

EDIT: Although I probably shouldn't say Valve doesn't get called out, there seem to be no shortage of Valve anti-fanboys who are even more pretentious than the plain old fanboys, just itching to go off on you for having a goddamned opinion.
 

RanD00M

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I've actually never heard of an argument against IW that somehow relates to the engine that they use. I have however often heard people ***** at Valve for still using the Source engine, and I kinda agree with that. Upgrading to a new engine won't kill you, or at least upgrading it to Source Engine 2.
 

Midnight Crossroads

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Dense_Electric said:
It's not because IW uses the same engine, it's because the gameplay in every CoD game is EXACTLY the same. By contrast, if you're going to tell me that the gameplay of Portal and Team Fortress 2 are anywhere near similar I'm going to have to ask you to step outside. Even Half-Life 2 and Left 4 Dead, both fairly generic FPS's in terms of gameplay, feel different. CoD4 feels identical to MW2 or BlOps, hence why IW gets called out while Valve doesn't
They should feel different, as they're in different series. All the Call of Duty games fall under the same franchise.
 

Bags159

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Radeonx said:
Because there are tons and tons of Valve fanboys (Not that there aren't Call of Duty fanboys that say stupid shit) that consider Call of Duty to be below them and will not hesitate to trash anything related to Call of Duty.
They are the vocal minority, but they are still very vocal.

And there is constant work being done on the source engine.
Kheapathic said:
Because Valve fans are the most loyal, blind and aggressive people you'll find outside of Nintendo fans.
You guys should really read the below.

TestECull said:
Valve has been constantly improving the Source engine. Half Life 2 and Portal 2 look like they're on entirely different engines, and the things you can do in Portal 2 were unheradof in 2005. But it's the same engine.

IW engine? They haven't done a damn thing to it.

See the difference now? See why gamers don't mind the Source engine but balk at Activision spewing another junkheap on IW Engine?
Even if they have updated it at least VALVe explains what they do and mention that they update it, making it a lot more obvious.
 

redisforever

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Because the Source engine is easily moddable, and the used by other companies. Meanwhile, the only reason QoS got to use it is...look up the developers. The Source engine is extremely flexible, and can run on so many computers and systems.