Unreal Engine 4 won’t be available for several years

If you’ve played a game since the late 1990′s there’s a 99% chance you have experienced the Unreal Engine. Unreal Engine has been prominent in countless games and platforms including the iPhone and iPod Touch. The latest iteration, Unreal Engine 3, was made to take advantage of current generation systems and it may be the last version we see for many years.

Mark Rein, president of Epic Games, spoke to Kotaku during DICE and stopped expectations of possibly seeing Unreal Engine 4 anytime soon. The reason for this is that Unreal Engine 4 requires multi-core processors that Epic feels the PS3 and Xbox 360 can’t provide. Rein believes there is a chance the successors of the PS3 and Xbox 360 may not be be able to handle it as well.

We have no way of knowing when we’ll see the next generation of consoles but we can make a few inferences. Sony has said repeatedly that it expects the PS3 to have a 10 year life span just like the PS2 had. The PS3 was released in 2006 so by Sony’s logic, we won’t see the PS4 until 2016. The Xbox 360 still has to take full advantage of Project Natal and the applications that will spawn from that technology. The Natal era on the 360 could easily last for the next five or more years.

This doesn’t mean Unreal Engine 3 will run out of steam before then. Games such as Gears of War 2 and Mass Effect 2 both run on the current Unreal Engine and are stunning to watch in action. With quality such as that, we won’t mind Unreal Engine 3 sticking around for as long as Epic lets it.

Via [Kotaku] Read [That VideoGame Blog]