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HeroEngine meets Star Wars
wowclones
Member Posts: 127
I see a lot of blame towards HeroEngine about many of TORs pitfalls. This was written a month before TORs release by one the owners of HeroEngine:
Hero’s Journey
Long ago in a company far far away, we were building a game called Hero’s Journey. It was an ambitious game with many wonderful features. We had our own special way of building games based on a unique process that we had developed while building pioneering online games like GemStone and DragonRealms. Our goal was to build a modern graphical MMO RPG that allowed our team of designers to continually add new content into the game – new areas, new spells, whatever they could think of.
We took an early version of our game to the legendary 2005 E3 show. We rented a small room in the back of a small hall, very far away from the giant multimedia extravaganza exhibits of EA, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, and the rest of the empires. We set up meetings with people we knew, members of the press, friends in the industry, and publishers. We hoped to build enough interest to get a publisher to provide enough funding to expand the team and finish the game.
A few people got very excited, but not the way we planned.
“I NEED THIS.”
We showed the game to our friend Gordon Walton. We had known Gordon for many years, back in the days when he worked for Kesmai, our late great competitor. Gordon had since been with Sony for its Star Wars Galaxies game among other places. He knows games, especially online games.
Not only did we show him the game, but because Gordon knew us so well we showed him the development tools we had built around our special process – building the game online, in realtime, with tools for the entire team all in one package.
“I need this,” said Gordon. “I am about to start a special project and these tools will let us build and prototype fast and get something running in a hurry.” Gordon is not an excitable guy by nature but this had his adrenaline flowing. “This is just what I need! I want to license your engine.”
We had thought about offering our engine and tools to developers but we had expected that we would have to actually ship a game first, like Epic did with Unreal Tournament before they licensed the original Unreal Engine.
“It’s not productized yet,” we told Gordon. “There are whole sections of code that is only roughed in and not optimized for performance or security. And there are very few comments and very little documentation.”
He didn’t care. “We are going to have tons of engineers. We can finish it ourselves. We’re going to want to modify your source code for our special project anyway.”
BIOWARE LICENSES HEROENGINE FOR…
A few months after the show we heard from Gordon again. He was now the co-head of a new online game studio in Austin as part of BioWare. This was very impressive. Not only was Gordon a solid guy but BioWare was (and still is!) at the very top tier of game developers, the kind of company that made games that were always great. Soon the deal was done – soon meaning after months of painful negotiations and many weeks of meetings with teams of engineers who examined every line of our source code and interrogated our engineers. We were concerned over their making major changes to our engine, but we loved the size of the check that came with the deal.
A year or so later, it became clear to us that BioWare was building a Star Wars MMO. We had to keep the secret for another couple of years but it was incredibly exciting. If you watch some of the videos of BioWare developing SW:TOR, you can see HeroEngine and its unique tools and process being used by the massive team on this incredible project.
Our role began and ended long ago, in a company far far away, but we’re still excited over the part we have played in helping BioWare (now part of EA, of course) bring its vision to life.
by Neil Harris, President and COO of HeroEngine
Hate seeing others get blamed for EA's and Bioware's mishaps, so there you have it.
Source:
http://www.heroengine.com/2011/11/heroengine-meets-starwars/
Comments
Yeah, he had a shorter comment about that last year. He said that, essentially, the engine is BioWare's engine while the tools are their tools. That they (BioWare) had taken the engine and and heavily modified it and never asked for any help in how to improve it.
It kind of shows as BioWare has always had crappy engines.
I've actually looked into licensing options with it, and some other engines, for quite some time. It's not that expensive and I figure since we're very experienced modders who've done this on-and-off for years and years and years that maybe we could make a good enough play demo to get some funding. Plus, the engine has evolved a lot since BioWare got it in 2006. I haven't checked on multi-threading in six months, but that is on their list of what they intended (as of late last year) to add.
Of course, with the crash-burn-and-die of SWTOR... We may just get the ol' brush-off... But one can hope.
Also, they'll host your custom MMO for 30% licensing. That's not a bad deal if you don't have millions of dollars in capital.
The only people to blame for ToR's problems are the upper managment at EA/Bioware - those that signed the contracts and made the big decisions - everything should fall on their shoulders.
I understand some people enjoy the game, fine. But for me there has been no bigger let down then what Bioware designed. Lots of poor decisions along the way.
I don't think it's fair to say that all of Bioware's engines have been terrible. The one they used for the NWN series was fairly good at what it done and they made a hugely good and important move to make the toolset available for everyone to use.
If I remember correctly as well they had a lot of people working there that had experience with the Infinity engine used for Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment and the Icewind Dale series as well and that really was the first engine that managed to put the tabletop turn based system into a game and manage to get combat going in real time without it coming across as... weird. The NWN engine expanded on that and really, for it's time, was one of the best engines around seeing as it was so easy to mod and create content for the game without having to do really bad botch jobs on things. They really should have kept evolving it to make it easier to scale into the hundreds of players as opposed to up to 50 or so. They could easily have made massively popular d&d based games using that engine that would rival the multiplayer experience of any of the MMORPG's we have today.
i think Biowares biggest mistake was this
BioWare: WoW is the "touchstone" for The Old Republic
http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/02/10/bioware-wow-is-the-touchstone-for-the-old-republic/
Speaking on the keynote panel at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas, BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk added a bit of fuel to that particular fire by outlining how SWTOR is treading the path laid down by the current king of the genre.
"It [World of Warcraft] is a touchstone. It has established standards, it's established how you play an MMO. Every MMO that comes out, I play and look at it. And if they break any of the WoW rules, in my book that's pretty dumb," Zeschuk said.
EQ2 fan sites
I disagree. WoW's subscribers show that there is still a demand for its type of gameplay.
The problem with SWTOR is that it tried to emmulate WoW but is still an inferior product in basically every aspect except story telling.
SWTOR's has a less immersive, more linear world than WoW, it has fewer less challenging raids, it has fewer warzones, crafting is almost useless, it was/is missing basic MMO features such as a proper LFG tool and Guild functionality, worse performance, it heavily encourages solo gameplay (even compared to WoW), etc...
Simply put, SWTOR is not up to par.
WoW doesn't retain players because of the quality of its gameplay, but because of popularity, lack of rivals as well the attachment of subscribers to their characters and their friends/guild mates still playing WoW.
I've never blamed the Hero Engine, mostly just cuz I knew the circumstances. As someone else has also stated, the decision makers at BioWare were really the people to blame for how it turned out.
BOYCOTTING EA / ORIGIN going forward.
All of which are things that could have applied to SWTOR had it actually been a polished, fully featured MMO.
What I am trying to say is that SWTOR didn't have to re-invent the wheel to be successful, it just had to be a competitive product.
release at the right time with the right stuff like WoW.
SWTOR is on par with WoW, if it was relesed 5+ years ago it would be huge, if it was released instead of WoW it would be where WoW is today.
No, WoW clones fail one after another, WoW retains its subs on critical mass an inertia, and every supposed "WoW killer" is just a WoW clone.
When finally idiots that run the show realize that you cant just copy WoW to be as successful, and failure of SWTOR might finally do it, it will be a time to have a game that is worth paying a sub.
The ironic thing is - Blizzard might be first one to actually do that.