Earlier posts comparing the two engines seem to be missing the main difference. NetImmerse/Gamebryo is really more of a scenegraph + renderer than a complete game engine. With NI, you write all of your own code for handling how objects behave in the world, you need to figure out how all of them fit together and how they connect back with their scenegraph-side representations, you figure out how objects talk to each other, etc. UE provides an implementation for all of this, as well as an *extremely* powerful programming language for implementing new Actor types/modifying existing behavior/etc. I wouldn't be surprised if you could write an entire title in UE3 without ever touching the C/C++ side of the engine. However, big-world games have different requirements than a normal FPS level-based game. More work needs to be done if you're trying to implement a large streaming world with thousands of characters with active AI in UE than if you were just banging out in UE. This lessens some of the advantage (but not that much since you're going to need to deal with the problem no matter what engine you use).

The rendering capabilities of UE vs. NI aren't even comparable, so I won't go down that path other than saying that UE is orders of magnitude ahead even without bringing third-party packages in to the mix. They aren't even in the same category.

note: I believe that NI has released a separate package implementing some of the gameplay-side features, but I don't think anything has shipped using it.

For the record. I am not doubting how good the Unreal Engine is. It does its job damn well. But given that I have not seen an open world game made on UE, I think it is safe to assume that it was not intended for that purpose. Though I am sure that if some time were devoted to make it do that, it would also be very good.

In the end. BethesdaGS is sticking with their engine, as they said it is hardly Gamebryo anymore, because it is what they know and it does what they need it to do just fine.

Now to restrain myself. I get annoyed too easilly, even if there is nothing to be annoyed with.

The All Points Bulletin districts maybe...?

It would be all steps in the right direction.

As soon as you have used several other game engines, you might not be so partial to one or any. I might have invested many hundreds of hours in gamebryo, and know a fair share, but I could care less. What I really learnt about games and engines from spending all that time with gamebryo isn't limited to knowing how to use nifskope and what nearly every single block in a nif does. I learnt things that have allowed me to step into ever engine I have tried so far and create good quality assets and export them into the games I mod- just takes a little reading and some experimentation. If Beth drops gamebryo, so be it. Technology moves on.

Yeah I worked for EA for about 4 years as a designer and artist. Now I work as a butler/handyman to my girlfriends family, yea economics.

TO give you an open source idea of the difference we are talking about, GB is the Ogre Engine, it's got a rendering layer, a scenegraph, a scripting layer, and potential to be more. UE is something like ScummVM, FSO, or Spring, it comes with a lot of [censored] that you may or may not need but are useful to have.