Epic Games' Unreal Engine 3 has become ubiquitous among next-gen games, but the middleware is also starting to receive its own share of criticism, highlighted by the recent lawsuit filed by Too Human developer Silicon Knights.

Now Digital Extremes, developer of the upcoming Dark Sector, is speaking out against Unreal Engine 3 also. The Canadian studio has long been a partner of Epic Games. In fact, Digital Extremes helped Epic to create the first Unreal engine back in 1998. In a new interview with Australian website Gameplayer, however, Dark Sector game director Steve Sinclair revealed that Digital Extremes decided to create its own proprietary graphics engine rather than use Unreal Engine 3, because Epic supposedly isn't living up to its promises with its latest engine.

"A lot of promises were made about the Unreal III engine, particularly on PS3. But as we see now, the time frames haven't been met and now a lot of games using it are being held up," he said.

This is precisely the problem that was spelled out by Silicon Knights (SK) in its suit. SK claims that Epic did not have a suitable version of Unreal Engine 3 ready soon enough while they were happily taking licensing fees to help fund Gears of War. Epic's vice president Mark Rein has said that his company did nothing wrong, and Epic recently filed a countersuit alleging that SK actually misappropriated Epic's technology.