It's no longer Unreal Engine 3.
It's now NetherRealm Engine.
That's all we really need to know. What they've done with it is fantastic.
Also:
If that is in fact true, that's pretty fucking smart, and would make sense why Inj2's load times are so shockingly quick.
You misunderstand.
The game itself does not load assets it does not use, the game is an end product and you do not need its parent engine on your machine for the game to run as it's a framework of its own.
By load times I meant loading up the engine to work on it.
How fast a game loads is entirely up to its own makeup.
Think of each animated scene as a separate area or stage that loads itself in.
The injustice 2 loading screen where Batman walks up to that console is most likely not a scene, it's just a video that the game has saved inside of it. The character select screen, however, is. It's got a background, and depending on what character your cursor is on, it loads up that one. On slower machines, you can see the various pieces of equipment separately load up unto a character ID that's a blank slate at first, to give you an idea.
Then the fighting arenas are separate stages in 3d space which is fun because if you hack into the game and move around with a free camera you can see some hidden stuff and often how they use 2d props in 3d environments if those props are not going to be seen from any other angle.
Then the characters and their personal effects are loaded up into this environment and are animated based on preset variables so all in all, a fighting game like this only gets load-intensive (comparatively to its intended native systems - as they can indeed be load-intensive on weaker or unoptimised systems) in the sense that the stored data gets unloaded and reloaded between games to avoid glitches and memory problems.
Injustice's speed is due to it being highly refined as a game, the engine's parts getting deleted help the developers not having to load up entire libraries of unused functions.
