Your Facebook games could look like this someday, thanks to Unreal

Epic Games' Unreal Engine 3 just blew FarmVille and friends out of the water. During a panel at this year's Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, company VP Mark Rein showed off what it's capable of with Flash, the technology behind most Facebook games and web-based games. And it looks absolutely stunning, like nothing you've ever seen before on Flash.

If a game developer ever decided to use the Unreal Engine on Facebook, Google+ or elsewhere, the results could look like this image. That said, none of what Epic depicted represents a real game or anything in the works at the studio--Epic is showing off. "This isn't your father's FarmVille," Epic's Mark Rein said, according to Kotaku, "this is immersive, 3D, beautiful environments."

According to Kotaku, what Rein showed in full-screen looked like what players will find on PCs, game consoles and even iPhones and iPads right now. (Ahem, like in Infinity Blade Dungeons?) Whether developers will actually be interested in bringing such graphically rich games to Facebook or Google+ is up for debate, but the fact that it's possible right now is kind of mind-blowing.

"Our long-term goal is to be able to do Samaritan in Flash," Rein said later in the presentation, referring to the tech demo that Epic showed to GDC goers back in 2011. Take a look at that here, and imagine that running in Facebook.

Are you excited for future Facebook games that could look like this, or do you not see the point? Would game makers bite on tech like this? Sound off in the comments. Add Comment.