What engines and tools do high end games use?

Question

First of all, I am a beginner developer so please don't get me wrong. I just want to know what programs do high end games use. By high end I mean games that me and you would buy, say Splinter Cell, Starcraft, WoW, GTA and the list goes on. Do they use Visual Studio? Unity? I have no idea :P

PS: Sorry for the tags, not sure if I chose the best I could.

Answer 1

A lot of big development companies will have their own engines, others will pay for licenses to use some of the big-name engines like:

• Unreal: http://www.unrealengine.com/ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games)
• Source: http://source.valvesoftware.com/index.php
• CryEngine: http://www.crytek.com/cryengine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CryEngine_games)

Doing a quick google reveals that Splinter Cell uses the Unreal engine, WoW and Starcraft use proprietary engines, and the GTA series uses Rockstar's own RAGE engine.