Just days ago, Crytek, the inventor of the CryEngine, filed a lawsuit against Cloud Imperium Games, the team behind Star Citizen. The developers had previously used the CryEngine, but last year, they switched to the Amazon Lumberyard to run and develop their game. However, Crytek claims that recent screens show that Star Citizen is still using their game engine. All of this begs the question, why didn’t Star Citizen simply stay with Crytek?

Game engines are complicated, huge things, and they make or break games, even more so than what developer, writer, or publisher is working on a game. An engine is the entire world of a video game, and it not only determines whether or not it will look good, but much more importantly, whether it will play smoothly. For instance, Valve’s engine, Source, was designed with far more intricacies than any other engine at the time of its launch in 2004 when it essentially premiered physics engines to the world. Now, every game has physics implemented into their game, but before Source, it wasn’t close to standard.

In the case of Star Citizen, the decision to switch engines is more complicated than just what other games have been made on the engine. The CryEngine was used most notably on Prey and Evolve, two games that performed admirably. Amazon’s Lumberyard, by contrast, offers different values, such as cloud integration and native integration of Twitch features with a focus on online and multiplayer. For a game like Star Citizen, this could be the deciding factor if they can better utilize the cloud or Twitch features of Amazon’s engine. It could also be because Lumberyard is completely free, which could save a company millions of dollars in revenue.

But choosing an engine is a complicated process, and when it goes wrong, it goes very wrong. All anyone has to do is look at Mass Effect Andromeda to see that. Granted, there were a lot of problems with the production of Andromeda, but by far the biggest problem was the engine. EA’s premier engine, Frostbite, was something that worked well for many of their biggest titles, like Battlefield, but in a cost-saving effort, the higher-ups made the call to slowly shift all EA games to Frostbite so they would have more flexibility in moving programmers from game to game. Unfortunately, Frostbite is a mediocre engine in many regards, and its biggest weaknesses come to glaring obviousness when put in an exploratory open-world like Mass Effect.

By forcing the entire series onto a new engine, EA killed the entire franchise – all because of an engine. The problems with Andromeda were too numerous to count, but the most glaring was taking a role-playing game with emotions at its core and taking an engine that could not support it. The facial expressions were hilarious to nightmarish, and whatever story was written was immediately destroyed by the inability to convey it through the engine. It didn’t help that the game was also littered with bizarre bugs like floating NPCs and the protagonist getting stuck in certain poses.

From clipping through walls or floors to animations that make no sense, the engine is the direct line from player to game world. It also means that EA games in particular should be looked at warily. EA didn’t decide what engine worked best for its games; it decided what engine was best for their bank. With games like Star Citizen, it’s worth seeing what they have to say about their engine and their choices not just what their engine has been used on in the past. Among the biggest things gamers should be looking at when choosing a game is its engine, just ahead of the developer, and in EA’s case, the publisher.