NCsoft to Employ Unreal Engine 3 in Two New Games

The company behind Guild Wars and Lineage can now be added to the list of developers making use of Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3, it was announced today. NCsoft had made previous use of Unreal Engine (albeit Unreal Engine 2) for both Lineage II and Exteel.

“Unreal Engine 3 has a well structured rendering pipeline, and its graphical quality is superb thanks to advanced lighting and shadowing systems,” said Young-muk Choi, lead programmer, Development Unit, NCsoft. “Tools within the Unreal Editor empower us to instantly produce and optimize our outputs, and we especially love how the engine enables designers to easily prototype concepts without the need for programming.”

“NCsoft pioneered online game development using Unreal Engine, as evidenced by Lineage II, one of the most commercially successful and enduringly popular online games in history,” said Jay Wilbur, vice president of Epic Games. “We are thrilled to take this next step with NCsoft, and are fully committed to supporting their projects.  We expect to be completely wowed by what they do with our latest technology.”

I can’t imagine Guild Wars being developed with Unreal Engine given how long it’s been in development, but could NCsoft’s PlayStation 3 project take advantage of the middleware engine? We really don’t have any clue, but expect further details in the coming months.