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Ubisoft explains why they created a new engine for Watch_Dogs
Coming from a DSOGaming interview with Dominic Guay, Senior Producer on Watch Dogs...
“We built the Disrupt Engine alongside the project, since the beginning. We knew what we wanted to achieve required us to build new tech. This was caused by the density of a modern day city, the staggering amount of details, the ability to cross this world at speeds of 150 miles an hour while preserving all the details, our intention to push the player immersion and the high fidelity of the world. But beyond that, we wanted to have a dynamic game world that reacted to the players actions. Our game direction did not allow for a static world that only played carefully pre-designed scenarios. In WATCH_DOGS, players have the freedom to choose their own plan using a large array of approaches and the game needs to respond to them. This required us to increase the interactivity of our game engine affecting all areas: physics, graphics, animation, AI…”
Now, on the subject of third party technologies, there are no solutions that we know of that matches those criteria available. The engines you refer to are very much driven toward serialized content that you generally traverse through “levels”, not a fully open world game without choke points and loadings. They also manage online in a traditional manner, having you go through lobbies and menus, separating multiplayer and single player. There is also a considerable strength in having full ownership on one technology. It empowers the developers and favours innovation in every areas. It guarantees that no area of the technology is a black box, that the team can adapt and extend the game’s engine to answer all of its needs.”
Link
“We built the Disrupt Engine alongside the project, since the beginning. We knew what we wanted to achieve required us to build new tech. This was caused by the density of a modern day city, the staggering amount of details, the ability to cross this world at speeds of 150 miles an hour while preserving all the details, our intention to push the player immersion and the high fidelity of the world. But beyond that, we wanted to have a dynamic game world that reacted to the players actions. Our game direction did not allow for a static world that only played carefully pre-designed scenarios. In WATCH_DOGS, players have the freedom to choose their own plan using a large array of approaches and the game needs to respond to them. This required us to increase the interactivity of our game engine affecting all areas: physics, graphics, animation, AI…”
Now, on the subject of third party technologies, there are no solutions that we know of that matches those criteria available. The engines you refer to are very much driven toward serialized content that you generally traverse through “levels”, not a fully open world game without choke points and loadings. They also manage online in a traditional manner, having you go through lobbies and menus, separating multiplayer and single player. There is also a considerable strength in having full ownership on one technology. It empowers the developers and favours innovation in every areas. It guarantees that no area of the technology is a black box, that the team can adapt and extend the game’s engine to answer all of its needs.”
Link