With the releases of Shadow Complex and Arkham Asylum I have seen a lot of hate over the Unreal Engine. I don't get it, I really like the look of games with the engine and it's probably my favorite game engine if  have to choose one. I can sort of get the complaints with the facial animation but they mostly look great and the texture pop-in doesnt bother me at all.
 What do you think, does it deserve the hate or not?

Personally, i don't think it's an extremely well optimized engine. There are a few games that utilize it well, but that only because the developers have studied and spent time working around all of the engine's shortcomings.

You can't even get Anti-Aliasing in America's Army 3.0 using that engine. But I think that's the fault of the developer and not the engine itself.

The faces are bullshit, but apart from that the engine doesn't bother me

It's a graphically great engine except it's not hugely optimised well, it needs a bit more tuning.

• Texture pop-ins. 
• Crappy facial rendering. 
• Not very good at rendering vegetation, foliage.

I don't mind it, it seems to provide some alright looking games and from what I hear it's both versatile and easy to use. I say props to them. 

i dont like it becuase it seems.. i dunno... seems like its made by people who wanna go LOOK AT US KICKING ASS! BADASS GRAPHICS! COMPETE WITH THAT, BITCHES !!   
its just an inner feeling, i cant express it, but i dont like how things look in the Unreal engine. they annoy my eyes

Its a pretty old engine. There are better engines out there is the bottom line, dunno why people are still using this.

"

• Texture pop-ins. 
• Crappy facial rendering. 
• Not very good at rendering vegetation, foliage.

 

" @Mordukai said:

"

• Texture pop-ins. 
• Crappy facial rendering. 
• Not very good at rendering vegetation, foliage.

 

That pretty much sums it up. "

The first version of UE3 and the first UE3 engine games seemed extremely poor.  They all had the same bad lighting effects, they all performed considerably worse than other engines, they all looked kind of bad.
 
Recently they've been on UE3.5, since Gears of War 2.  It's quite a bit better, arguably still far from the best looking engine, but at least now even 3rd party games are comparable to some of the best looking games which don't use UE3.
 
The bad face rendering is a combination of cheap lighting effects & bad shadow maps.  You need to throw more power in a UE3 game to get faces to come out looking right.  I find a lot of UE3 games have a washed out look, lots of really poor looking specular effects...
 
Weirdest thing I've noticed about UE3 games.  They always have lights the same shade of pink.  I've seen it in so many games.  Colors don't saturate well or realistically (Mirror's Edge is an exception which uses UE3, but obviously they really tweaked stuff heavily).  Why are there so many pink lights?  It's as if the developers are using the most basic tools and can't set their lights to red or something.

bump

Just putting it out there, I would kill for a Source Engine 2.0, that engine rocked the world. The issue with Unreal is that while a very robust and versatile engine, it isn't well refined, and any refining done has to be done by the developers, who simply can't be bothered. Having said that, the competition isn't amazing.

UE3 is the lowest common denominator of "next-gen" engines.  It's affordable for most studios to license, meaning it helps keep the budget down.  Unfortunately, companies are becoming more and more willing to use a poorly optimized engine in order to make a good game that suffers from bugs and glitches galore rather than license a worthwhile engine and have a solid game. 
 
Hopefully, id Tech 5 will change all this and we can forget the travesty that is UE3.

" Just putting it out there, I would kill for a Source Engine 2.0, that engine rocked the world. The issue with Unreal is that while a very robust and versatile engine, it isn't well refined, and any refining done has to be done by the developers, who simply can't be bothered. Having said that, the competition isn't amazing. "

It's just too overused. I remember when it was new and I was the only one that was into it, it was cool then, but then all the poseurs came in and started liking it but THEY'RE NOT THE REAL FANS

 " Hopefully, id Tech 5 will change all this and we can forget the travesty that is UE3. "

Not only the engines fault, but it feels like many games that are using the UE3 Engine, are just so boring in the colours. Shadow Complex was so boring to look at, but then theres Bioshock, which made the engine its own. And if I remember right, Borderlands is using the UE3 Engine .. just a modified one of course. 
 

@Mordukai

"

• Texture pop-ins. 
• Crappy facial rendering. 
• Not very good at rendering vegetation, foliage.

" Not only the engines fault, but it feels like many games that are using the UE3 Engine, is just so boring in the colours. Shadow Complex was so boring to look at, but then theres Bioshock, which made the engine its own. And if I remember right, Borderlands is using the UE3 Engine .. just a modified one of course. 
 
@Mordukai said:

"

• Texture pop-ins. 
• Crappy facial rendering. 
• Not very good at rendering vegetation, foliage.

And this pretty much sums it up too ^^ "

Batman looked great, but that was mainly because the developers put a great bit of time attempting to eliminate every possible problem. A lot of other games have failed at this though.

I think the UE3 looks and runs fantastic. Never seen any texture pop-in in UE3 games either. (keep in mind this is all from pc experience)

For the last time, the fact that things 'look cartoony', or what colors are used in Unreal Engine 3 games does NOT HAVE TO DO WITH UNREAL ENGINE 3. It amazes me that people think that a game engine determines how gritty or cartoony a game is. 
 
These things are caused by the engine: 
 
-Pop in (although this can be minimized by preloading textures into memory) 
-Assets handled by middleware tend to look similar (speedtree). 
-Some shaders used in UE3 games clearly haven't been modified much from the stock ones, which tends to make things look similar (again, this is an artistic decision).
 
It pretty much ends there. A lot of UE3 games overuse shader effects like bumpmapping and gloss, as well as HDR, but that's a purely artistic decision. 
The fact of the matter is that the Unreal engine is quite an excellently optimized engine with an unparalleled, extremely well supported (better than any other engine) toolset, and it is very extensible and flexible. 
 
That is not to say that there aren't more powerful game engines. However, one has to consider that: 
 
-A game engine built specifically for a single console (Naughty Dog's engine, for example) has it much easier than one built primarily for cross-platform compatibility (UE3)
-Building a game engine from scratch is far beyond the realm of possibility for most studios.
-The Unreal Engine IS occasionally shoe-horned into games it wasn't designed for. It's not really designed for large terrains/open worlds. 

" For the last time, the fact that things 'look cartoony', or what colors are used in Unreal Engine 3 games does NOT HAVE TO DO WITH UNREAL ENGINE 3. It amazes me that people think that a game engine determines how gritty or cartoony a game is. 
 
These things are caused by the engine:  -Pop in (although this can be minimized by preloading textures into memory) -Assets handled by middleware tend to look similar (speedtree). -Some shaders used in UE3 games clearly haven't been modified much from the stock ones, which tends to make things look similar (again, this is an artistic decision). It pretty much ends there. A lot of UE3 games overuse shader effects like bumpmapping and gloss, as well as HDR, but that's a purely artistic decision. The fact of the matter is that the Unreal engine is quite an excellently optimized engine with an unparalleled, extremely well supported (better than any other engine) toolset, and it is very extensible and flexible.  That is not to say that there aren't more powerful game engines. However, one has to consider that:  -A game engine built specifically for a single console (Naughty Dog's engine, for example) has it much easier than one built primarily for cross-platform compatibility (UE3)-Building a game engine from scratch is far beyond the realm of possibility for most studios.-The Unreal Engine IS occasionally shoe-horned into games it wasn't designed for. It's not really designed for large terrains/open worlds.  "

arg i hate unreal! arg! so mad.... cannot contain it.

Lol, shiny semi realistic engine with really good textures.

It's all about SCUMM, baby.

Doesn't bother me, I think people just wanted something to blame for the unoptimized games, it could be the engine's fault, but to me the developer is at fault for letting it happen, there are other shitty games that runs at bad framerate and they weren't on U3E.

There's also the restrictions on how the art looks, some games have the typical U3E look to them, and some developers doesn't do much with it, but that's pretty much it, I wish they'd use other engines but yea, I don't really care, it's their choice, I wouldn't really hate on the engine.

What's with the bumpage?
 
I'm pretty fond of the UE3 when it's used well, such as in Batman AA, Mirror's Edge or The Last Remnant (PC version). Those are games that I could not tell were using the engine just by looking at them, and they had a very unique look to them unlike the other UE3 games that use the same stock art and shaders. There might be other games like that, but none come to mind right now.