International Online Game Developer Licenses Epic’s Unreal 3 Engine

Cary, N.C. — Epic Games’ Unreal 3 game engine will be at the core of two massively multiplayer games to be developed by NCsoft.

The South Korea-based company has used the Unreal 2 engine in the soon-to-be released Exteel and the already published Lineage II.

“NCsoft pioneered online game development using Unreal Engine, as evidenced by Lineage II, one of the most commercially successful and enduringly popular online games in history,” said Jay Wilbur, vice president of Epic Games. “We are thrilled to take this next step with NCsoft and are fully committed to supporting their projects. We expect to be completely wowed by what they do with our latest technology.”

Epic’s game engine is one of the world’s most popular, being used by platform, PC and online game developers around the world.

“Unreal Engine 3 has a well-structured rendering pipeline, and its graphical quality is superb thanks to advanced lighting and shadowing systems,” said Young-muk Choi, lead programmer of the development unit for NCsoft. “Tools within the Unreal Editor empower us to instantly produce and optimize our outputs, and we especially love how the engine enables designers to easily prototype concepts without the need for programming.”

Financial terms were not disclosed.