Curious: Why not Cryengine?

I just watched the Dragon Age Sacred Ashes trailer and wondered to myself why more developers don't try to license out cryengine from Crytek. The visuals in DA:O are far from awful, but Crysis on my 8800m GTS looks almost exactly like the CGI in the trailer with maybe a bit less facial detail but better environment. Games like DA:O and Mass Effect (haven't played 2 yet) would have looked unbelievable on Crysis' engine and it's common knowledge that most PC gamers drool over it. So why the lack of outsourced games? Is the reluctance on the part of Crytek or the developers themselves?

I'm genuinely curious. Does anyone know?

 

crysis wasn't even released until november 2007, and big budget games like mass effect, etc. usually take longer than two years to develop.

done.

 

Mass Effect looks pretty damn good. And 60 fps too on my rig. Crysis runs at 25-30fps

 

I'd say because it's a lot harder for machines to run it. A lot of the people who buy the game then complain because it does not run well on their Pentium 4, 1GB RAM and X1600 machines. The developers do not really want to push graphics all that much at the moment, because they are afraid that people will do the same thing they did when Crysis came out, and complain no end that they get crappy framerates, and that they can't even run it on medium.

 

Exactly what CZX58 said. CryEngine is a *itch on anything remotely underpowered. They wouldn't limit their market to only those select folks that can max out the options and really enjoy the game the way it was intended. I think Crysis hit a home-run in 3 ways... 1) It helped the hardware manufacturers bottom lines fiscally. 2) It spurred better driver support. 3) It showed consumers just what was possible from a modern graphics engine. Even now, it's still common to hear someone say.. "But can it run Crysis??"

 

If you're an eyecandy junkie, then it's a given that Cryengine sets the benchmark and everything else looks like a poor relation.

However for a lot of gamers without top of the line hardware, having games which are scalable yet with a decent hook for playable longevity is worth any number of graphics engines.

 

Two reasons. First, Cryengine is not really well suited to a lot of games. For example DA:O is as far from an FPS as you can get and you'd need to rewrite the engine significantly to allow the things that DA:O does, particularly since it comes with a rather complex toolset.

But the second reason (performance) is the more important one. The issue is not that PC gamers will not be able to run it -- the game is from two years ago and the number of gamers still using machines that can't use it is small -- but that it won't work on consoles. Remember, the consoles are now more than 3 years old (the 360 is from 2005 and the PS3 is from 2006) and if you have trouble thinking of the practical implications of this, consider the fact that each of them has a grand total of 512MB RAM between the CPU and GPU combined. You can't run Cryengine on that; even the very well optimized Unreal Engine 3 forces developers to do unsavory things like leave out female models to make it work at something vaguely resembling modern graphics.

Crysis was perhaps the last AAA game to be PC only and this allowed it to get away with higher minimum requirements. To be honest, I'm not expecting any new games to be this way -- even something as ill-suited to consoles as DA:O got ported to both the 360 and PS3.