[elektronika]

> Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel

There's a degree of toupee fallacy to this. It's hard to tell what engine something is on just from gameplay if the team invested in custom rendering and gamefeel.

[protocolture]

I think it used to be more true than it is these days.

I used to be able to pick graphics/physics engine by feel alone. PhysX and Havok used to feel very different. Quake 3/Half Life/Unreal used to feel very different. But that's all largely been paved over.

Actually I think I can still spot Crytek tbh.

[filoleg]

> Quake 3/Half Life/Unreal used to feel very different.

Fair on the Unreal Engine part, but Quake 3 and Half-Life are basically built on sibling engines that share one direct common ancestor (though I fully agree with you that they felt different).

Quake/Quake 2 used idTech2. idTech3 for Quake 3 was built on top of idTech2, and GoldSrc for Half-Life was built on top of idTech2 as well (it was a heavily customized and modified version of it).

[xnx]

Perfect term for it. We can all spot the UE games that look like UE games. Same goes for people who are confident about being able to spot AI.