CryEngine becomes free

My 2 cents about this : we need competition, and we should look at the facts.

Remember UDK ? Or before that ? Epic Games has come a great way since that time. They’ve opened up, they’ve taken a wildly different stance on indie gaming, and they’re not just catering to the big-name studios anymore. Unity is probably why and no matter how we feel about the technical capabilities of Unity and Unreal Engine, we should be thankful that this has happened the way it did. CryEngine, today, is arguably in bad shape, it’s pretty much like UDK was in 2010 - a very good rendering system brought low by bad tools and a lack of flexibility. UE4 is so incredibly much better than UDK was, it’s easy to forget how painful it was to write code with UDK, how limited Kismet was, how horrendous it was to ship something.

On the other hand, CryEngine is (arguably) unmatched when it comes to exterior settings, and I wish Epic Games was able to give us some of that quality. UE4’s TXAA has been taking fire for years now, the reflections still need some love, the engine stability is sometimes debatable as well. The pics TK-Master linked page 3 were really beautiful and it’s hard to deny that you’d be hard pressed to recreate them in UE4 with the same level of quality.

So yeah. Be fact-based, compare technologies with an open mind, and hope for the best.