lol you're not going to make AAA cryengine games as an individual.

Models would cost a fortune (to benefit from directx11 vs 9)and the coding is 10x more difficult than Unity. Also Unity is hitting mobiles/web/console market for small developers where Cryengine is solely PC for large studios(yea they released an indie version, I have it, give it a shot, it's nasty). Unity is comparable to XNA, neither of which are comparable to cryengine. Also Unity and Unreal are comparable with pro version of unity. Unreal might be a little better on desktop but it followed unity into the web market and pretty sure they don't do mobiles/consoles yet.


At the same time you'll make 10x as many features with unity as you would on the others because it's extremely fast to work with(workflow and coding).

But to answer your question it's a mix of shitty textures, amateur artists, low budgets and not 100% reflective of what's possible with the engine. Whatever the model looks like in maya, 3ds, blender, or whatever 3d modeling software you use is what it'll look like in the engine. Also remember it costs $1500 for pro unity, so a lot of unity games you see from individuals are using a free version which has "polishing" features locked (dynamic lighting/shadows/render enhancements).

Is the renderer state of the art? Nope, but is the abstracted API that lets you convert your code to multiple platforms including web/mobile/console "state of the art"? Yepper, saves a ton of work.

Just out of curiosity why did you think Cryengine 3 was nasty? Was it the workflow? Difficulty of use? Also have you tried UDK and if so what did you think of that? I haven't used any engines yet, only made games through starting brand new projects. However I'm thinking of trying one just to see what they're like

[quote name='EJH' timestamp='1330633506' post='4918345']
Angry Birds, Minecraft, and Farmville have more players per night than Crysis 2 or Unreal 3.

Game engine does not matter. If the game is good people will play it.

This,

The fascination with graphics is getting stupid, game companies are losing customers because they dedicate all their time on pretty graphics where patches & expansions are eye candy only, seriously take EVE Online as an example, they released content where they spent years making things shiny and pretty which resulted in a loss of players AND the graphic content was such a resource drain that only a few players could handle it. Sure its nice to have things pretty but theres a balance. People dont inject themselves with heroin because of how it looks, they inject because its addictive, make an addictive fun playing game and people will play, you think games like club penguin, travian and wow got popular because of graphics?
[/quote]

I agree. I'd be happier with slightly lower quality weapons and effects if there were more of them. Spending all your time on a game that requires a high-end machine to run is silly. It should be just as enjoyable to run at low settings, and not a mark of shame to run it at the lowest settings. I will not buy a new computer to run a game that requires more power than my current computer does. That's just foolish.

That's almost like paving a new highway with a speedlimit of 150mph/240kmh. Yeah, that's great and all, and it is wonderful, but few people will get to use it, no one will buy a new car just to drive on it, and ultimately, it will likely waste time and money.

+1 for the heroin analogy.

I´ve now worked a little bit with unity and designed a map etc.
And I have to say it looks really pretty. Not like crysis or something. But equal to current mmos(excluding gw2^^)

Yea I went out and got a new android to test my new free android license and it's really slick. I had to roll back to 3.4 version to get the accelerometer controller working with my setup but most of my code from other projects works perfectly on my phone, and instead of using the mouse to aim you tilt/pivot the phone. In minutes I was shooting projectiles, spawning killable monsters, and had portals to various locations and maps. Now I have to switch over my hud to Guitextures instead of the ongui functions I was using.

Most of the graphics related discussions tend to point out a need for custom shaders to make it pop.