johng Blog

Had an interesting discussion with my bro the other night about videogame sequels reusing the engine from their prequel. Personally being from a PC gaming background I kind of feel that the next iteration of a game should be pushing the hardware further and thus it’s only a true sequel if such a substantial change is made. Any thing else is just a glorified expansion pack really, isn’t it? Well he made a good point about furthering story lines and new environments, the example we kept going back to was Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow which was really a stop gap until Chaos Theory that uses a totally updated engine.

The thing that changed my mind really though was the mention of Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2. In terms of the plot, scope and scale of the sequel it clearly is more than a glorified expansion. It furthers the storyline of the previous game and introduces new elements and features to the role-playing to make it more enjoyable. So a definite sequel in the same engine.

This kind of engine reuse becomes more apparent when we reach the end of a console generation. All the games I have mentioned in this post are multiplatform and are limited by technology that’s approaching five years old now. So inherently in the last years of a console’s life we have reached its optimal performance and so there is little use in developing new engines. Obviously on the PC this is not the case and I would continue to hold my original opinion that new engines should be utilized for games that are exclusive to PC (including titles later ported to consoles).