I do find it funny that people think the SWTOR worlds were designed without day/night cycle and weather because they were limited by the Hero engine.
Not. At. All. True.
You are right the Hero Engine can do day and night cycles and even have weather effects. Bioware chose to not use them. They baked on hard shadows and decided to not have day and night. They threw out the random weather effects and now have statci effects(it will always rain in that one certain spot).
Bioware chose to be lazy and they just didn't care.
I don't think they are being lazy. For story telling purposes, each planet will need their own weather effects and day and night cycle. A rain in Dromund Kaas has to be different from a rain in Alderaan. Day and night has to be different too because of different planet setting. Remember, this is space, some planets has 2 - 3 suns, several moons. Unlike a fantasy setting where you can just assume earth planet setup.
That, I think, is what beyond Hero Engine capability. So, if you cannot do it right, don't do it at all or you will ruin your environment feeling. That's the main reason I think why Bioware did not do it.
Very few MMOs can afford the time to make their own engine. Warhammer Online and Rift used the Gamebryo engine. DC Universe Online and Global Agenda use the Unreal Engine (with DCUO having Havoc Physics). SWTOR is using The Hero Engine. The only other game that used it was Faxion Online which was so terrible it lasted all of four months before closing down.
Making a gaming engine is not something any game developer will ever want to do. The companies that make really good gaming engines are rich. Crytek for example (creators of the Cryengine 1, 2, and 3) have seven studios all busy on projects and all profiting heavily.
Epic Games have done so well with their Unreal Engine they ONLY make and configure gaming engines.
So yeah, gaming engines is big business. It is also something that is expensive to make.
Usually when a new game engine is debuted it doesn't come from a gaming company. It usually comes from a bunch of MIT type students who have spent 4 years of university working with a research team to develop it. These gaming engines are debuted at conferences like E3 and are usually shown off at really cheap looking boothes using a pretty crappy home made game rendering that only shows the power the engine has.
Gaming engines take a long time to develop. Crytek had an entire studio ONLY working on Cryengine 2 and it took THREE YEARS for them to make it.
If you are building an MMO you do not have time to build your own gaming engine.
The only MMO to have built its own gaming engine is Funcom with Age of Conan. They built this engine for The Secret World and adapted it to Age of Conan to show off their engine. Oh and of course World of Warcraft.
You forgot Turbine, they have been using the same engine and updating it since AC2. They finally had worked out all the kinks and got efficient with it by the time LoTRO came out.
I never said they could'nt, I said they chose not to. They were lazy and they didn't care. They gave some lame excuse about story and ambience and they couldn't even add the sound of a freaking waterfall or birds into the game and you say they did it for ambience?
The lack of ambient sounds is odd, I will agree. I'd think it wouldn't be too hard for them to turn off ambient sounds for conversations, but I'm guessing that was the reason.
Didn't want background noise competing with dialogue.
As for lazy?
Well, I think the ultimate form of LAZY development is creating games without content or with repeatable content like randomly generated missions.
Creating content is a lot of work. Creating thousands of hours of content? Um yeah, not lazy.
EVE PvE, that is lazy development.
Handing everything to the players, making them responsible for their own fun like sandbox games do, now that is lazy development.
Bioware doesn't really have a good history with crafting game engines. Almost every engine they've had up until ME2 was total trash.
Very few game development studios actually use their own in-house built engines.
Why?
It's a ridiculous amount of work.
Hence why everybody leases engines like Unreal and Crysis and Frostbite and Havok etc. etc. because they are made by companies whose job is #1 making engines to lease to other dev studios.
I do find it funny that people think the SWTOR worlds were designed without day/night cycle and weather because they were limited by the Hero engine.
Not. At. All. True.
You are right the Hero Engine can do day and night cycles and even have weather effects. Bioware chose to not use them. They baked on hard shadows and decided to not have day and night. They threw out the random weather effects and now have statci effects(it will always rain in that one certain spot).
Bioware chose to be lazy and they just didn't care.
Wow you got it 100% wrong.
They didn't cut corners.
They purposefully chose not to have day/night cycle because they wanted to make sure each planet had a very specific feeling, tone, ambience for the story telling.
You may not agree with them, but that is why they did it. Not because they couldn't or because they didn't have time to.
I never said they could'nt, I said they chose not to. They were lazy and they didn't care. They gave some lame excuse about story and ambience and they couldn't even add the sound of a freaking waterfall or birds into the game and you say they did it for ambience?
"Esport with tournaments is for hardcore pvp'rs that want to be competitive. Openworld PVP with ganking and griefing is for casuals that just wants their pvp mixed with pve from time to time." otacu
I don't think should have built their own engine necessarily. They could have easily went with some other engines mentioned in this thread. I think what they should have done was not go with the Hero Engine obviously. It's flawed in so many ways, and it's limitations are not only clear in the planet design, but also in the performance on ilum. So should they have built their own engine over Hero is the real question and it's pretty damn obvious that anything would have been better than what currently exists.
The weather issue is just one of many other comments from the devs that show their laziness in designing an immersive game. If you ever wonder why something isn't in the game the response is, it didn't really make sense to do that. And yet they claim they were innovative. Except that even planets without life have complex weather systems in our own solar system, but these don't? Don't even get me started on day/night. Apparently the sun rising on a planet doesn't fit in with a planet having a dreadful feel... lmao
Even if they had spent only 50 million on this game, I would still be left wondering where exactly all the money went.
I never said they could'nt, I said they chose not to. They were lazy and they didn't care. They gave some lame excuse about story and ambience and they couldn't even add the sound of a freaking waterfall or birds into the game and you say they did it for ambience?
The lack of ambient sounds is odd, I will agree. I'd think it wouldn't be too hard for them to turn off ambient sounds for conversations, but I'm guessing that was the reason.
Didn't want background noise competing with dialogue.
As for lazy?
Well, I think the ultimate form of LAZY development is creating games without content or with repeatable content like randomly generated missions.
Creating content is a lot of work. Creating thousands of hours of content? Um yeah, not lazy.
EVE PvE, that is lazy development.
Handing everything to the players, making them responsible for their own fun like sandbox games do, now that is lazy development.
Sandbox games are lazy development now? Wow.
You do realise that it is much harder to design a world where players can create content rather than created scripted content? For example, Eve's crafting system is far more complex than almost any Themepark MMO. Same with 0.0 combat and putting the mechanics in place to allow for players to control territory, do you think that is easy?
Just because you dont appreciate sandbox games does not make the devs developing them lazy. If anything they are free thinking visionaries who think outside the (WoW) box.
I never said they could'nt, I said they chose not to. They were lazy and they didn't care. They gave some lame excuse about story and ambience and they couldn't even add the sound of a freaking waterfall or birds into the game and you say they did it for ambience?
The lack of ambient sounds is odd, I will agree. I'd think it wouldn't be too hard for them to turn off ambient sounds for conversations, but I'm guessing that was the reason.
Didn't want background noise competing with dialogue.
As for lazy?
Well, I think the ultimate form of LAZY development is creating games without content or with repeatable content like randomly generated missions.
Creating content is a lot of work. Creating thousands of hours of content? Um yeah, not lazy.
EVE PvE, that is lazy development.
Handing everything to the players, making them responsible for their own fun like sandbox games do, now that is lazy development.
Lmao, you know whats lazy? making a wow clone and playing it so safe.
"Esport with tournaments is for hardcore pvp'rs that want to be competitive. Openworld PVP with ganking and griefing is for casuals that just wants their pvp mixed with pve from time to time." otacu
I do find it funny that people think the SWTOR worlds were designed without day/night cycle and weather because they were limited by the Hero engine.
Not. At. All. True.
You are right the Hero Engine can do day and night cycles and even have weather effects. Bioware chose to not use them. They baked on hard shadows and decided to not have day and night. They threw out the random weather effects and now have statci effects(it will always rain in that one certain spot).
Bioware chose to be lazy and they just didn't care.
Wow you got it 100% wrong.
They didn't cut corners.
They purposefully chose not to have day/night cycle because they wanted to make sure each planet had a very specific feeling, tone, ambience for the story telling.
You may not agree with them, but that is why they did it. Not because they couldn't or because they didn't have time to.
I never said they could'nt, I said they chose not to. They were lazy and they didn't care. They gave some lame excuse about story and ambience and they couldn't even add the sound of a freaking waterfall or birds into the game and you say they did it for ambience?
Well the lack of hi-res textures and variety in character customization is apparently because they need lots of memory for the cutscenes so things look extra good. I admit though I don't know how much I can blame the hero engine for that. Although if Bioware had this planned from the start I think they would have made a engine designed for the specifics of a MMO with cutscenes
With 200mil going into the game I think they should have.
"In the immediate future, we have this one, and then weve got another one that is actually going to be so were going to have, what we want to do, is in January, what were targeting to do, this may or may not happen, so you cant hold me to it. But what were targeting to do, is have a fun anniversary to the Ilum shenanigans that happened. An alien race might invade, and they might crash into Ilum and there might be some new activities that happen on the planet." ~Gabe Amatangelo
You do realise that it is much harder to design a world where players can create content rather than created scripted content? For example, Eve's crafting system is far more complex than almost any Themepark MMO. Same with 0.0 combat and putting the mechanics in place to allow for players to control territory, do you think that is easy?
Just because you dont appreciate sandbox games does not make the devs developing them lazy. If anything they are free thinking visionaries who think outside the (WoW) box.
I love sandbox MMO games, I just haven't seen a real one since UO.
EvE is a joke when used in the same sentence as "good game design."
SWG would also fit into that category, as would FFXI and EQ1.
Don't even get me started on the abominations that are.. welll every "sandbox" released since the above mentioned.
Point is - what takes more time and effort? Creating formula based repeat missions ala EvE or SWG or creating thousands of hours of voiced quest content?
Systems based game play is always more complex, and much more difficult to "get right" I'll give you that. But saying that it's "lazy" to do content based game play is ignorant and foolish.
EvE is a joke when used in the same sentence as "good game design."
Oh really? That's interesting...
I wonder about your measures and qualifications for "good game design".
The last time I played Eve, I spent a couple weeks building up and getting a decent ship to get into a nice sized battle only to hit a single attack and then wait for over five minutes to see what happened. THAT is bad game design. The grind to get a decent enough ship was bad enough but one attack in five minutes only to have the battle completely resolved by the time I could attack again was a total waste of time. Canceled and deleted the game from my computer after that. I miss the crafting system . . . almost, just not enough to try playing the game again.
"If half of what you tell me is a lie, how can I believe any of it?"
EvE is a joke when used in the same sentence as "good game design."
Oh really? That's interesting...
I wonder about your measures and qualifications for "good game design".
The last time I played Eve, I spent a couple weeks building up and getting a decent ship to get into a nice sized battle only to hit a single attack and then wait for over five minutes to see what happened. THAT is bad game design. The grind to get a decent enough ship was bad enough but one attack in five minutes only to have the battle completely resolved by the time I could attack again was a total waste of time. Canceled and deleted the game from my computer after that. I miss the crafting system . . . almost, just not enough to try playing the game again.
So good game design for you is "easy streamlined themepark game"
Good to know
"It has potential" -Second most used phrase on existence "It sucks" -Most used phrase on existence
Originally posted by GMan3 The last time I played Eve, I spent a couple weeks building up and getting a decent ship to get into a nice sized battle only to hit a single attack and then wait for over five minutes to see what happened. THAT is bad game design. The grind to get a decent enough ship was bad enough but one attack in five minutes only to have the battle completely resolved by the time I could attack again was a total waste of time. Canceled and deleted the game from my computer after that. I miss the crafting system . . . almost, just not enough to try playing the game again.
I am not sure what you mean with "to hit a single attack and then wait for over five minutes to see what happened" but the combat is tactical, not twitch based.
It might not fit your shoes but that does not make it a bad design, it's just not your type. No game is for everyone.
And regarding the "grind", what makes you think that the issue isn't on your end?
Very few MMOs can afford the time to make their own engine. Warhammer Online and Rift used the Gamebryo engine. DC Universe Online and Global Agenda use the Unreal Engine (with DCUO having Havoc Physics). SWTOR is using The Hero Engine. The only other game that used it was Faxion Online which was so terrible it lasted all of four months before closing down.
Making a gaming engine is not something any game developer will ever want to do. The companies that make really good gaming engines are rich. Crytek for example (creators of the Cryengine 1, 2, and 3) have seven studios all busy on projects and all profiting heavily.
Epic Games have done so well with their Unreal Engine they ONLY make and configure gaming engines.
So yeah, gaming engines is big business. It is also something that is expensive to make.
Usually when a new game engine is debuted it doesn't come from a gaming company. It usually comes from a bunch of MIT type students who have spent 4 years of university working with a research team to develop it. These gaming engines are debuted at conferences like E3 and are usually shown off at really cheap looking boothes using a pretty crappy home made game rendering that only shows the power the engine has.
Gaming engines take a long time to develop. Crytek had an entire studio ONLY working on Cryengine 2 and it took THREE YEARS for them to make it.
If you are building an MMO you do not have time to build your own gaming engine.
The only MMO to have built its own gaming engine is Funcom with Age of Conan. They built this engine for The Secret World and adapted it to Age of Conan to show off their engine. Oh and of course World of Warcraft.
How did blizzard afford to make their own engines for everything from WC3 to WoW to Diablo. Where did all that money come from?
I don't have their analyst information but Blizzard doesn't own itself, and never has. Blizzard has always been a subsidiary of some major gaming giant. Before it was Vivendi games which has basically gone out of existence. Today it is Activision. Because Blizzard has been able to get some big poppa funding it has been able to create their own crap.
For the record Guild Wars was not an MMORPG, and never was intended to be. GW2 will be an MMO that has its own engine... when or if it ever gets released.
Everquest is not a game I would have thought about initially. But like Blizzard they are owned by a very large corporation that has the financial backing to make a big investment into a gaming engine..
My point was merely that gaming engines are a big dollar industry that exists because gaming developers do not have the time to build gaming engines if they want to release super powerful awesome games. As an example Bethesda Studios used the exact same engine between Morrowind and Fallout: New Vegas all because they didn't have the time to build a new one.
Even Funcom has made their own Engine, they are a fairly small company (atleast compared to EA/Bioware) and they dont have any big company that backs them up... So i can't imagine it would be that hard for EA to make their own Engine for SWTOR, atleast with all the money and development power they have.
I guess EA just wanted to take a shortcut though and didnt wanna spend the extra time / money on it, but with all the money they spent on developing SWTOR i dont really understand why they didn't..
You do realise that it is much harder to design a world where players can create content rather than created scripted content? For example, Eve's crafting system is far more complex than almost any Themepark MMO. Same with 0.0 combat and putting the mechanics in place to allow for players to control territory, do you think that is easy?
Just because you dont appreciate sandbox games does not make the devs developing them lazy. If anything they are free thinking visionaries who think outside the (WoW) box.
I love sandbox MMO games, I just haven't seen a real one since UO.
EvE is a joke when used in the same sentence as "good game design."
SWG would also fit into that category, as would FFXI and EQ1.
Don't even get me started on the abominations that are.. welll every "sandbox" released since the above mentioned.
Point is - what takes more time and effort? Creating formula based repeat missions ala EvE or SWG or creating thousands of hours of voiced quest content?
Systems based game play is always more complex, and much more difficult to "get right" I'll give you that. But saying that it's "lazy" to do content based game play is ignorant and foolish.
I never said it was lazy. Not innovative, simple and playing it safe yes but not lazy.
Comments
I don't think they are being lazy. For story telling purposes, each planet will need their own weather effects and day and night cycle. A rain in Dromund Kaas has to be different from a rain in Alderaan. Day and night has to be different too because of different planet setting. Remember, this is space, some planets has 2 - 3 suns, several moons. Unlike a fantasy setting where you can just assume earth planet setup.
That, I think, is what beyond Hero Engine capability. So, if you cannot do it right, don't do it at all or you will ruin your environment feeling. That's the main reason I think why Bioware did not do it.
You forgot Turbine, they have been using the same engine and updating it since AC2. They finally had worked out all the kinks and got efficient with it by the time LoTRO came out.
Bioware doesn't really have a good history with crafting game engines. Almost every engine they've had up until ME2 was total trash.
Yes they should but no they couldn't as some arsehat accountant in the EA corp hq on the 42nd floor worked out it would cost more.
The lack of ambient sounds is odd, I will agree. I'd think it wouldn't be too hard for them to turn off ambient sounds for conversations, but I'm guessing that was the reason.
Didn't want background noise competing with dialogue.
As for lazy?
Well, I think the ultimate form of LAZY development is creating games without content or with repeatable content like randomly generated missions.
Creating content is a lot of work. Creating thousands of hours of content? Um yeah, not lazy.
EVE PvE, that is lazy development.
Handing everything to the players, making them responsible for their own fun like sandbox games do, now that is lazy development.
Very few game development studios actually use their own in-house built engines.
Why?
It's a ridiculous amount of work.
Hence why everybody leases engines like Unreal and Crysis and Frostbite and Havok etc. etc. because they are made by companies whose job is #1 making engines to lease to other dev studios.
How dare you!
http://i41.tinypic.com/minqsj.png
http://i43.tinypic.com/10mszmg.png
http://i40.tinypic.com/xerejk.png
http://i43.tinypic.com/1zl3c5k.png
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"Esport with tournaments is for hardcore pvp'rs that want to be competitive. Openworld PVP with ganking and griefing is for casuals that just wants their pvp mixed with pve from time to time."
otacu
I don't think should have built their own engine necessarily. They could have easily went with some other engines mentioned in this thread. I think what they should have done was not go with the Hero Engine obviously. It's flawed in so many ways, and it's limitations are not only clear in the planet design, but also in the performance on ilum. So should they have built their own engine over Hero is the real question and it's pretty damn obvious that anything would have been better than what currently exists.
The weather issue is just one of many other comments from the devs that show their laziness in designing an immersive game. If you ever wonder why something isn't in the game the response is, it didn't really make sense to do that. And yet they claim they were innovative. Except that even planets without life have complex weather systems in our own solar system, but these don't? Don't even get me started on day/night. Apparently the sun rising on a planet doesn't fit in with a planet having a dreadful feel... lmao
Even if they had spent only 50 million on this game, I would still be left wondering where exactly all the money went.
Sandbox games are lazy development now? Wow.
You do realise that it is much harder to design a world where players can create content rather than created scripted content? For example, Eve's crafting system is far more complex than almost any Themepark MMO. Same with 0.0 combat and putting the mechanics in place to allow for players to control territory, do you think that is easy?
Just because you dont appreciate sandbox games does not make the devs developing them lazy. If anything they are free thinking visionaries who think outside the (WoW) box.
My gaming blog
I beg to differ on this one. Infinity Engine was awesome. Aurora Engine was very good as well.
Lmao, you know whats lazy? making a wow clone and playing it so safe.
"Esport with tournaments is for hardcore pvp'rs that want to be competitive. Openworld PVP with ganking and griefing is for casuals that just wants their pvp mixed with pve from time to time."
otacu
Now, now, I am sure that an advanced civilization has cloning.
Well the lack of hi-res textures and variety in character customization is apparently because they need lots of memory for the cutscenes so things look extra good. I admit though I don't know how much I can blame the hero engine for that. Although if Bioware had this planned from the start I think they would have made a engine designed for the specifics of a MMO with cutscenes
The Aurora toolset was great. The Aurora engine was extremely mediocre.
With 200mil going into the game I think they should have.
"In the immediate future, we have this one, and then weve got another one that is actually going to be so were going to have, what we want to do, is in January, what were targeting to do, this may or may not happen, so you cant hold me to it. But what were targeting to do, is have a fun anniversary to the Ilum shenanigans that happened. An alien race might invade, and they might crash into Ilum and there might be some new activities that happen on the planet." ~Gabe Amatangelo
We must have very different definitions of lazy.
I for one consider 5-6 year development time and 200 million dollars anything but lazy.
Misguided? Maybe.
Dated? Maybe.
Lazy? Not a chance.
I love sandbox MMO games, I just haven't seen a real one since UO.
EvE is a joke when used in the same sentence as "good game design."
SWG would also fit into that category, as would FFXI and EQ1.
Don't even get me started on the abominations that are.. welll every "sandbox" released since the above mentioned.
Point is - what takes more time and effort? Creating formula based repeat missions ala EvE or SWG or creating thousands of hours of voiced quest content?
Systems based game play is always more complex, and much more difficult to "get right" I'll give you that. But saying that it's "lazy" to do content based game play is ignorant and foolish.
Oh really? That's interesting...
I wonder about your measures and qualifications for "good game design".
The last time I played Eve, I spent a couple weeks building up and getting a decent ship to get into a nice sized battle only to hit a single attack and then wait for over five minutes to see what happened. THAT is bad game design. The grind to get a decent enough ship was bad enough but one attack in five minutes only to have the battle completely resolved by the time I could attack again was a total waste of time. Canceled and deleted the game from my computer after that. I miss the crafting system . . . almost, just not enough to try playing the game again.
"If half of what you tell me is a lie, how can I believe any of it?"
So good game design for you is "easy streamlined themepark game"
Good to know
"It has potential"
-Second most used phrase on existence
"It sucks"
-Most used phrase on existence
I am not sure what you mean with "to hit a single attack and then wait for over five minutes to see what happened" but the combat is tactical, not twitch based.
It might not fit your shoes but that does not make it a bad design, it's just not your type. No game is for everyone.
And regarding the "grind", what makes you think that the issue isn't on your end?
Even Funcom has made their own Engine, they are a fairly small company (atleast compared to EA/Bioware) and they dont have any big company that backs them up... So i can't imagine it would be that hard for EA to make their own Engine for SWTOR, atleast with all the money and development power they have.
I guess EA just wanted to take a shortcut though and didnt wanna spend the extra time / money on it, but with all the money they spent on developing SWTOR i dont really understand why they didn't..
Currently Playing Path of Exile
as a gamer then a profound YES!!! MAKE AN AWSOME GAME
as a corporate investor then a profound HELL NO GIVE ME MY MONEY
Yep, they saved money/time on in-house engine development so they could spent them on the game itself..
Budget size makes no difference in your fallacious reasoning.
I never said it was lazy. Not innovative, simple and playing it safe yes but not lazy.
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