I am quite surprised on how many titles have used this engine. Why is it so popular? is this the most widely used engine? please share some facts about this engine which might not be available in our beloved Wiki. Also please mention the competitors/popular Game Engines. I gotta dig a lot on this.
EDIT: this is a query regarding the most used/popular engine, not necessarily the most beautiful looking one like CryEngine or ForstBite 2 etc.
Its the most popular because it is the most familiar engine. It has been around for like 14-15 years and veteran game devs who have been in the industry long enough must have worked on it at some point of time.
Plus unreal engine 3 is not just a graphics engine. It is an umbrella group of many technologies like Kismet, speedtree, physx etc. So when game devs license UE3 they get the entire package which is pretty sweet even though they might end up not using most of the things that comes with the it.
And UE3 was not just used in successful games, entire franchises like Dues Ex(the first 2 games), Splinter Cell, Bioshock, Batman Arkham Series, Mass Effect etc have been created almost entirely using unreal engine. But at the same time, there are several cr@ppy games based on this engine.
In technical terms, UE was a pioneer in many game design and game development techniques which are still widely used today like additive level designing(people wrongly credit the Cube engine for this but it was unreal1 which had this feature) dynamic lighting, some texture compression algorithms that are defunct now, rag doll physics(it was there in UE2 before Halflife2's havok made it widely popular), design-level scripting to alter gameplay mechanics(this became a hit in modding community which was unreal engines prime USP imo).
If you are interested you can head over to:
Unreal Wiki
UDN - Main - WebHome
one is an official site from Epic and the other is a community wiki. OR if you just want a list of games:
List of Unreal Engine 3 Games - Giant Bomb
List of Unreal Engine games - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Other popular current generation FPS engines(with prima-facie examples):
idtech 5 (Rage, Prey2)
Lithtech Jupiter EX (F.E.A.R.)
CryEngine 2/3 (Crysis/2/3)
Source Engine (HalfLife2)
X Ray Engine (S.T.A.L.K.E.R.)
4A Engine (Metro 2033)
Frostbite(Battlefiled 3)
Engines to look out for in the future(2013-2014):
Luminous
Idtech 6
Cryengine 4
Unreal Engine 4
Dunia 2 (Far Cry 3)
