This article is directed at SW people-in-the-know, or Gamebreaker watchers.
Gamebreaker had an interesting portion with Larry, in which stuff was said at GDC (via James Ohlen) to indicate that the high pricetag of SWTOR was not because of voiceovers, but because EA had to deal with the game engine which was unsupportive of multiplayer activity from the start. I can find references to the event where Ohlen references EA's purchase of Hero's engine as "untested"; thats common knowledge, so no need to bring that up again (Google search will direct you). But OK (http://raidwarning.com/bioware-creative-director-details-swtor-development-issues/)
Stuff was said to indicate that even just a year before release, SWTOR was incapable of being played in a massive environment (more than 6-10 players even). Tweaks were made to allow the bare minimum .. which I think speaks volumes to the horrid performance the graphics engine delivers. It was tweaked further later.
I skipped to that section of the episode, for your consideration (It's a building conversation, so watch for a few mins):
I'm curious as to what Larry was speaking of, about the severe limitations of SWTOR just a year prior to release. Does anyone have a link to the 6-10 player cap?
Also, if anyone has a transcript of GDC 2013 with James Ohlen, that would also be helpful. I could not find one, or a complete video.
I'm not looking to focus on how the engine was procured, but rather what needed to be done to make it somewhat playable.
What was done? well they had to finish the engine...as you said common knowledge. BW rushed to procure the engine before it was complete, didn't complete it, then they pushed a shite product out the door, way too early and way over- hyped. Keeping with the norm for Triple A titles recently.
This debacle, for lack of a better term, rests sqarly on BW's shoulders. Thay can make any excuse they want, and I am sure they have several lined up however, they had the opportunity and they flushed it in order to make the quick buck.
This is a great study on how not to produce/market a MMO. A truly amateur, poorly planned and lead endevour.
If you want a new idea, go read an old book.
In order to be insulted, I must first value your opinion.
For further head scratching, Ohlen statees that Bioware/EA had 300 engineers working on the engine problems (with what I think most can agree with lackluster results) whereas Simutronics, in the same time, came out with their commercial ready to go Hero engine 2.0, with their 25 full time employees and 100 contractors in the entire company.
Even if EA had been able to license the new Hero Engine as it exists today, they'd still have had to heavily modify it to do what they want.
You always have to modify a game engine to do what you want if you're trying to make a serious game. Game engine designers can't anticipate everything that any game will ever want to do. They try to build in a lot of capabilities that they think a lot of games might want, but they can't do everything conceivable. And even if they could, it wouldn't be desirable to do so, as that would give you massively bloated code.
Is "Engine" really a good name for that software? It almost sounds as if it would have been better called the "chassis," or "Frame." Engine to me is analgous to car design, and there the engine makes the thing go, and determines the overall performance. Seems like from what Quizzical is saying, the engine is more of a primordial component.
Originally posted by Quizzical You always have to modify a game engine to do what you want if you're trying to make a serious game. Game engine designers can't anticipate everything that any game will ever want to do. They try to build in a lot of capabilities that they think a lot of games might want, but they can't do everything conceivable. And even if they could, it wouldn't be desirable to do so, as that would give you massively bloated code.
True. I think my biggest issue with the way this game was designed was the time wasted on tacking on that space part. I don't see how anyone could have thought that would be passable and it would have been better to leave that for an expansion. All that time spent on making the space shooter could have been used making sure things like Ilum and Legacy were ready for launch. Just my thoughts on the subject.
Originally posted by ignore_me Is "Engine" really a good name for that software? It almost sounds as if it would have been better called the "chassis," or "Frame." Engine to me is analgous to car design, and there the engine makes the thing go, and determines the overall performance. Seems like from what Quizzical is saying, the engine is more of a primordial component.
Suppose that you had the full source code to WoW, but none of the content. So you wouldn't have art assets, quest text, and so forth; or perhaps rather, you'd have only token amounts of them that you can use to see how the code works. But you're trying to create SWTOR, and can use whatever you want from WoW's source code to help you create your game.
If SWTOR wanted to do the same thing in the same way that WoW did, you could just grab the relevant chunk of source code and use it. But anything that SWTOR wanted to do differently from WoW would require either modifying some of the code from WoW or else scrapping the relevant code and creating your own from scratch. If SWTOR wanted to implement a feature that WoW simply didn't have, then you'd definitely have to create your own code from scratch. If WoW had a feature that SWTOR didn't want, then you'd toss out the relevant code that implemented it in WoW.
While an imperfect comparison, that's kind of like what licensing a game engine does for you. Whoever built the game engine tries to provide a bunch of stuff that would be useful for a lot of games. But they'll inevitably implement a bunch of things that you don't want, while not implementing a bunch of things that you do, simply because different games have different feature sets. Even if the game engine implements a feature and you want to implement the "same" feature at a high level, if you want to implement it differently, then you're going to have to change some things. Sometimes you have to change so many things that it's easier to just toss out the entire section of code and write your own from scratch.
One drawback of using WoW's source code as a starting point for SWTOR is that it would push SWTOR to make their game more like WoW. If WoW implemented something and SWTOR wanted to implement something kind of similar, it's more work to write their own than to simply use the source code from WoW directly. If they would have kind of liked to do it differently for SWTOR, but didn't particularly care, then they likely just use the WoW source code because they already have that, which makes it easier.
Now, obviously EA did not and does not have access to the full source code for WoW. But if a bunch of different games use the same game engine, and that game engine is set up to do things in a particular way, you can easily get a bunch of different games doing the same thing in the same way because it's what the game engine is set up for. That's not always a bad thing; if a bunch of different games have a login authentication system that works in exactly the same way because it's using exactly the same source code, so what? But when it comes to game mechanics were some variety is desirable, this can become more problematic.
Originally posted by ignore_me Is "Engine" really a good name for that software? It almost sounds as if it would have been better called the "chassis," or "Frame." Engine to me is analgous to car design, and there the engine makes the thing go, and determines the overall performance. Seems like from what Quizzical is saying, the engine is more of a primordial component.
Yes, because it does determine the overall performance of the final product. This isn't to say that a powerful game engine can't be bogged down, but it's no different than how a powerful car engine can be bogged down by a heavy body, power loss in the drivetrain, starved of fuel/air, or choked by too many accessories. So in some ways it's a fairly apt analogy.
But really game engines are more of a framework of features you build your game around, so more akin to a drivetrain rather than just the engine I suppose if you really want to use that metaphor.
In the case of the Hero engine from what I've read it sounds like they also included a large amount of built-in development tools. This isn't always the case though with a game engine, some just include compatibility with the more common development tools.
Originally posted by Quizzical You always have to modify a game engine to do what you want if you're trying to make a serious game. Game engine designers can't anticipate everything that any game will ever want to do. They try to build in a lot of capabilities that they think a lot of games might want, but they can't do everything conceivable. And even if they could, it wouldn't be desirable to do so, as that would give you massively bloated code.
So if you set out to create "full voiced story driven MMO" (core stuff), you dont pick engine (or suddenly dicsover 5 years in development with bajillion of people) that your (modified engine) completely sucks exactly in "fully voiced story driven MMO" part.
Seems that devs twiddled their thumbs for 5 years until someone on dev team dared to finally mention (aka pointing enourmous pink elephant in the room everyone ignored) "but engine sucks bigtime", of course, by their claims it seems it was "too late" already because they already built half of the game.
Seems they now have only bloated code, not for any gains but because of incompetence, they probably fired devs who worked on engine, so now they dont even have anyone that can actually fix it so they just let it slide.
The extra funny part, those problems were obvious from beta, but whenever someone mentioned bad performance/probelms in any context he had pack of rabid fanbois on his back saying that "game works flawless even on toaster"
And, whoever mentioned Space Game debacle, that was outsourced (like most of stuff in SWTOR anyway).
Originally posted by ignore_me Is "Engine" really a good name for that software? It almost sounds as if it would have been better called the "chassis," or "Frame." Engine to me is analgous to car design, and there the engine makes the thing go, and determines the overall performance. Seems like from what Quizzical is saying, the engine is more of a primordial component.
Well Heroengine is a game engine.. you need to build the game around it but without it the game would not go.. so yes it is like a car engine..
the issue was that they picked the engine up very early on in its development and they ran into issues with that version.
Either way they cant move the blame from themeselves they made a very boring game that hardly passes for an MMO.. They chose an engine that was not ready for commercial use adn they knew that..
heroengine today its a totally different beast you just need to look at the repopulation for that..
they should just remake the game like Square-Enix is doing with FFXIV...
new FFXIV client is capable to show up 100 characters around you, only limited by graphic card. Some companies should take care of their products, Star Wars is something big.. you cant drop it so bad..
Originally posted by ignore_me Is "Engine" really a good name for that software? It almost sounds as if it would have been better called the "chassis," or "Frame." Engine to me is analgous to car design, and there the engine makes the thing go, and determines the overall performance. Seems like from what Quizzical is saying, the engine is more of a primordial component.
Well Heroengine is a game engine.. you need to build the game around it but without it the game would not go.. so yes it is like a car engine..
the issue was that they picked the engine up very early on in its development and they ran into issues with that version.
Either way they cant move the blame from themeselves they made a very boring game that hardly passes for an MMO.. They chose an engine that was not ready for commercial use adn they knew that..
heroengine today its a totally different beast you just need to look at the repopulation for that..
apologists for the hero engine debacle can't really avoid the fact that for MMO's its really not a good choice, its pretty plain already that without some very heavy modification to the core engine itself, which Bioware had to do, kind of wonder if they wouldnt have been lots better off just creating their own engine, for what it cost them to fix hero engine, it probably wasnt worth having, hero engine imo, is more suited to multiplayer online/lan games, rather than MMO's, and if your pointing at repopulation as evidence of the 'current' hero engines capabilities, thats another negative tbh, and only really highlights how little hero engine has improved.
heroengine today its a totally different beast you just need to look at the repopulation for that..
The Repopulation isn't out yet, is it? If not, then it really doesn't tell you much about the Hero Engine.
The problem with licensing a game engine going awry isn't that the first thing you try to do completely fails. It's that you can get far into the project, and then discover that two things you really need conflict with each other and you can't do both without a major overhaul to things you thought you were done with.
You might think that the game is 95% done, but that last 5% to get it ready for release can be quite a doozy. I need to change this to do what I want, but changing this breaks that, so now I need to change that, too, which promptly breaks some other thing that you won't realize you broke for two weeks, at which point, you aren't even sure what broke it. Before you know it, you've created spaghetti code and don't even know what's wrong anymore.
That can happen even if you wrote your own game engine from scratch. But it's a lot easier for it to happen when you're trying to change code that you don't entirely understand than when you're trying to change code that you already understand because you wrote it yourself.
they should just remake the game like Square-Enix is doing with FFXIV...
new FFXIV client is capable to show up 100 characters around you, only limited by graphic card. Some companies should take care of their products, Star Wars is something big.. you cant drop it so bad..
There's a big difference between:
1) You can have 100 characters around you and draw all that you need,
2) You can have 100 characters actually on your screen, not counting ones that are nearby but slightly off of your screen,
3) You can have 100 characters actually on your screen without completely killing your frame rate, even on fairly capable hardware.
4) You can have 100 different characters on your screen without killing your frame rate, as opposed to 5 different mobs and a zillion copies of them,
5) You can have 100 different characters with data that needs to constantly be updated from the server, as opposed to something that can be done purely client-side, such as an NPC who stands in the same spot forever and never moves,
6) You can have 100 players on your screen constantly moving around and attacking arbitrarily without completely killing your frame rates, and
7) You can have 100 players on your screen with independent graphics, independent movements and attacks, moving around in real-time rather than turn-based, and without killing your frame rate or overloading your Internet connection.
Any one of those is a long, long way away from implying the next. And color me skeptical that they can do #7.
Basically this article should read "James Ohlen on how F2P saved his job" because that's really what happened imo.
I can't imagine anyone hiring him after the way they handled this game. The short amount of time for the lifting of the NDA prior to launch where the game was freely open to be reported on by the unbiased unpaid press was a clear indicator to me of just how this game was going to go. Then there was the launch patch of the game being nothing like the final beta in function and form because someone deleted something they shouldn't have. Then there was the design flaws of the game pushing the game back to a 2004 design rather then a 2012 design especially when dealing with things as simple as remote mission turnins and mission(quest) system design. And finally there is the availability of code that allows for multiple players to exist rather easily (more then 10 I know) on a pvp battlefield without destroying quality that it seems none of these developers tend to use.
If it weren't for the IP this game would have gone the way of the do do bird quickly. I am quite surprised he's still there honestly.
Originally posted by ignore_me Is "Engine" really a good name for that software? It almost sounds as if it would have been better called the "chassis," or "Frame." Engine to me is analgous to car design, and there the engine makes the thing go, and determines the overall performance. Seems like from what Quizzical is saying, the engine is more of a primordial component.
Well Heroengine is a game engine.. you need to build the game around it but without it the game would not go.. so yes it is like a car engine..
the issue was that they picked the engine up very early on in its development and they ran into issues with that version.
Either way they cant move the blame from themeselves they made a very boring game that hardly passes for an MMO.. They chose an engine that was not ready for commercial use adn they knew that..
heroengine today its a totally different beast you just need to look at the repopulation for that..
apologists for the hero engine debacle can't really avoid the fact that for MMO's its really not a good choice, its pretty plain already that without some very heavy modification to the core engine itself, which Bioware had to do, kind of wonder if they wouldnt have been lots better off just creating their own engine, for what it cost them to fix hero engine, it probably wasnt worth having, hero engine imo, is more suited to multiplayer online/lan games, rather than MMO's, and if your pointing at repopulation as evidence of the 'current' hero engines capabilities, thats another negative tbh, and only really highlights how little hero engine has improved.
My understanding is that they wanted to license an engine to get started on the game faster, rather than spending quite a while creating an engine before they can create anything more than token amounts of content for the game itself. If you make your own game engine from scratch, you can't do that.
The problem is that trying to start creating anything more than token amounts of content before the engine is settled can very easily backfire. If you decide that the way you've structured something is inefficient and you need to change it because it will double your performance in that portion of the engine, then that may require restructuring the data for your content. If you only have token amounts of data to change, then maybe you can do that in ten minutes. If you've already had 20 artists working for a year and then you need to change how all of the models are done, you could end up with a cost more naturally measured in man-years rather than man-hours.
Now, doubling performance in one small part of your game engine probably doesn't mean doubling frame rates in general. It might only mean 2% less CPU load and no change in GPU load for the same final output. But 1% here and 2% there dozens of times can add up to the difference between an efficient game engine that runs well on middling hardware and a badly-coded mess that strugges to run at all.
I said for a long time the game engine was crud, and how it limited the game. This entire thing just goes to prove that the game engine behind stwor is what has and still is causing this games problems.
Indeed.
It created the entire empty feeling on worlds like Coruscant, where you expect BUSY city life and not a handful of unanimated NPCs standing around like three days after the Apocalypse wiped out 99% of Coruscant's population, and the rest was nauseated! Even small towns all seemed dead and not active. Compare the GW2 cities and how alife and buzzing and real they look compared to the sterile, empty places of SWTOR. Most cities and towns in SWTOR don't even have any ambient sounds! They are totally silent!
So yes, I am totally inclined to believe it.
But there is one more thing in the Gamebreaker TV video: how this ex guy from Trion/Rift said, the classic MMO model is going to end soon? Yes. Yes it is. Developers can not make by far content that fast as players burn through it. And the ONLY reasonable answer is of course, to return to add sandbox elements. NOT a rollback to 2004 MMOs, but ADD sandbox elements ADDITIONALLY to the story.
And this is what I NEVER will understand, WHY ON EARTH SWTOR did NOT learn anything from SWG, and failed to add ANY sort of sandbox elements to keep people busy?! I don't get it. These sandbox elements were so popular in games like SWG or Ultima Online. People LOVED them. Can you imagine how cool SWTOR would have been with the present level of story PLUS sandbox elements? It would have been a killer game! And THAT is what MMOs need to do, they need to embrace the sandbox elements again! Give people stuff to do, player cities to build, full crafting economies to supply and weird non combat stuff like entertainers, musicians asf. to keep players busy beyond the quests and stories!
We few said so ALL ALONG. So we can only hope, TESO will be the last "classic" MMO as the pure themeparks are, because the future is sandbox-themeparks hybrids, and nothing else.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
(1) In your haste for a rebbutal you glossed over any key point. He is saying the engine isn't that bad because Hero isn't that bad and some work went into it via EA to make it alright, so how could it be bad? EA is saying their engine was horrible from the start. Then it comes out that Quizzical never ever played SWTOR.
I never made that argument.
The question of whether Hero Engine is good as an engine available for license is a question of how hard it is to modify it to be able to do what you want and do it well (runs fast, minimal bugs) as compared to other engines available for license. Ideally, you'd want it to be able to efficiently do a lot of things that you need for your game, and you'd want it to be relatively easy to modify the engine to be able to do what you need that it wasn't built to do when you licensed it.
But the Hero Engine as available for license is very different from the the game engine that SWTOR uses. They have a common ancestry in that they both came from the Hero Engine as it was a long time ago. But then EA forked the code base as you inevitably have to do if you want to make a serious game.
The question of how good SWTOR's game engine is for SWTOR has a lot more to do with how good the EA employees who modified the engine after forking the code base than how good the Hero Engine that they licensed was. Playing SWTOR today won't tell you much about how hard it was to make modifications to a game engine years ago.
Furthermore, even for SWTOR's game engine, just playing the game doesn't tell you as much as you might think. If a game engine absolutely cannot do something that whoever makes the game doesn't want to do anyway, that isn't a problem with the game engine. Game design decisions that you disagree with may make the game bad, but if the engine can efficiently do everything that the company wanted it to do, then it could be a good engine for a bad game.
Another important feature of a game engine is how hard it is to make content work with it. If two different game engines let you make graphics that look just as good, and the first gets you 5% higher frame rates, while the latter makes it only cost 1/3 as much to create content and add it to the game, then there's a pretty strong argument that the latter game engine is better. But that's not something that you can tell just from playing the game.
The quotes from James Ohlen make it sound like he thinks that the game engine is bad. And he might well be right. But blaming it all on the Hero Engine is ridiculous. If you buy and use tools that can't do what you want, it doesn't automatically mean the tools are bad (though they might well be). It means you're an idiot for buying and using them.
A perfectly good screwdriver doesn't necessarily make a good hammer. If you have a screwdriver and are trying to use it as a hammer and it's not working well, the problem is with the user, not the tool.
Hero Engine might well be a great engine available for license. It might be terrible. It might be a sensible choice for some games and a terrible choice for others. It might have some very good code for some of its features, and other broad swaths of code that are complete junk and should be scrapped in their entirety. But you can't tell just from playing SWTOR, or any other game that uses the Hero Engine for that matter.
I agree that the Hero Engine isn't fully to blame, but i believe it is partly to blame. It is, afterall, a major component of the whole blueprint of the design. It could be, that some coding modules were coded very terribly from the original Hero Engine team, so when the Swtor team picked up, it took them more time and money to modify it.
It's like hiring a mechanic to fix your car engine, and he modifies it very differently from the factory default. (bad analogy i know. lol.)
7) You can have 100 players on your screen with independent graphics, independent movements and attacks, moving around in real-time rather than turn-based, and without killing your frame rate or overloading your Internet connection.
Any one of those is a long, long way away from implying the next. And color me skeptical that they can do #7.
That maybe but that is by no means a monumental task... considering games like APB or even AoC or WAR already did it, so I doubt that FFXIV can't at least achieve some of that.
If such a medicore game like APB can do it (WITH fully customizable models mind you), I don't see how SWTOR can be doing soooo badly with just 10 people and no fully customizable cars WITH fully customizable tattoos/logos/colours/clothing or explosions or smoke effects.
the version of Heroes engine use by SWTOR must've been really terrible.
Interesting. Before the launch I thought I read articles that mentioned the whole reason to use the Hero engine was to avoid the cost of developing their own and give them more time to create content. When it launched many commented on the lack of content. Either way the outcome sucked for Bioware. One thing was successful and that is the absolutely gorgeous environments. Give me better space combat and I will gladly return.
Originally posted by tute One thing was successful and that is the absolutely gorgeous environments. Give me better space combat and I will gladly return.
Planetside 2's environment was even more "gorgeous" (in terms of ambience lighting and graphics) and yet the engine was developed entirely in house.
Bioware probably should've developed their own engine. Might have been better off (or better yet, even make money from selling the engine to others).
7) You can have 100 players on your screen with independent graphics, independent movements and attacks, moving around in real-time rather than turn-based, and without killing your frame rate or overloading your Internet connection.
Any one of those is a long, long way away from implying the next. And color me skeptical that they can do #7.
That maybe but that is by no means a monumental task... considering games like APB or even AoC or WAR already did it, so I doubt that FFXIV can't at least achieve some of that.
If such a medicore game like APB can do it (WITH fully customizable models mind you), I don't see how SWTOR can be doing soooo badly with just 10 people and no fully customizable cars WITH fully customizable tattoos/logos/colours/clothing or explosions or smoke effects.
the version of Heroes engine use by SWTOR must've been really terrible.
One hundred players on your screen at once, moving around in real time with independent 3D graphics? Really? I'm skeptical, as that really is hard to do. It's not just that drawing 100 is hard; if you actually have 100 on your screen at once with anything other than an isometric overhead view, then you probably have an awful lot more than 100 who are close enough that the server needs to tell you where they are. You can spin the camera around awfully fast, and if you don't even start loading assets until the camera moves, it will take a while for players who are just behind you to appear.
Maybe they can do 20 players on a screen at once. Maybe they can have 100 in an area, with usually 5-10 actually on your screen at once and occasionally spiking up to 20. But 100 players on your screen at once animated independently and with independent 3D graphics, with the location of all players updated promptly in real time and without killing your frame rate? I want a YouTube video of that, and I want to count. Because I'm skeptical.
Bioware probably should've developed their own engine. Might have been better off (or better yet, even make money from selling the engine to others).
Making an engine for your own game and making an engine to license to others are two different animals. If you make an engine for your own game, then you say, I don't need this capability for my particular game, so I don't need to implement it in the engine at all. Adding more than that is just bloat that makes it harder to follow what your engine does and may harm performance. But if your game engine only has the capabilities that your particular game needs and nothing more, then no one is going to want to license it, as other engines will have a lot more of the capabilities that they need.
And this is what I NEVER will understand, WHY ON EARTH SWTOR did NOT learn anything from SWG, and failed to add ANY sort of sandbox elements to keep people busy?! I don't get it. These sandbox elements were so popular in games like SWG or Ultima Online. People LOVED them. Can you imagine how cool SWTOR would have been with the present level of story PLUS sandbox elements? It would have been a killer game! And THAT is what MMOs need to do, they need to embrace the sandbox elements again! Give people stuff to do, player cities to build, full crafting economies to supply and weird non combat stuff like entertainers, musicians asf. to keep players busy beyond the quests and stories!
We few said so ALL ALONG. So we can only hope, TESO will be the last "classic" MMO as the pure themeparks are, because the future is sandbox-themeparks hybrids, and nothing else.
SWTOR learned a lot from SWG. Hence they went with the "themepark" style gameplay of WoW. Sandbox is still fringe at best, to make it more popular now would require a Heculean amount of coding to get those elements to form a more cohesive game that a majority of gamers would enjoy. Which is why you see so very few AAA sandbox titles, and the few you do see incorporate lots of linear elements for mass market appeal.
And you have to be a bit of a revisionist to look at SWG and see anything other than a flop. Sales? SWG is a pipsqueak compared to SWTOR and it was never a serious competitor to its contemporaries, also like SWTOR. Popularity? Again, SWG is tiny and was an also-ran back in the day like SWTOR is now. Innovation? Well I'd say it's got SWTOR beat here, but not by much, the main difference being SWTOR copied WoW, while SWG copied UO.
I realize it's hard to tell when you're wearing those rose-colored glasses sometimes but come on. I expect that when the next Star Wars MMO releases people will cry out, "How could you not learn anything from how awesome SWTOR was?!"
And this is what I NEVER will understand, WHY ON EARTH SWTOR did NOT learn anything from SWG, and failed to add ANY sort of sandbox elements to keep people busy?! I don't get it. These sandbox elements were so popular in games like SWG or Ultima Online. People LOVED them. Can you imagine how cool SWTOR would have been with the present level of story PLUS sandbox elements? It would have been a killer game! And THAT is what MMOs need to do, they need to embrace the sandbox elements again! Give people stuff to do, player cities to build, full crafting economies to supply and weird non combat stuff like entertainers, musicians asf. to keep players busy beyond the quests and stories!
We few said so ALL ALONG. So we can only hope, TESO will be the last "classic" MMO as the pure themeparks are, because the future is sandbox-themeparks hybrids, and nothing else.
SWTOR learned a lot from SWG. Hence they went with the "themepark" style gameplay of WoW. Sandbox is still fringe at best, to make it more popular now would require a Heculean amount of coding to get those elements to form a more cohesive game that a majority of gamers would enjoy. Which is why you see so very few AAA sandbox titles, and the few you do see incorporate lots of linear elements for mass market appeal.
And you have to be a bit of a revisionist to look at SWG and see anything other than a flop. Sales? SWG is a pipsqueak compared to SWTOR and it was never a serious competitor to its contemporaries, also like SWTOR. Popularity? Again, SWG is tiny and was an also-ran back in the day like SWTOR is now. Innovation? Well I'd say it's got SWTOR beat here, but not by much, the main difference being SWTOR copied WoW, while SWG copied UO.
I realize it's hard to tell when you're wearing those rose-colored glasses sometimes but come on. I expect that when the next Star Wars MMO releases people will cry out, "How could you not learn anything from how awesome SWTOR was?!"
Comments
What was done? well they had to finish the engine...as you said common knowledge. BW rushed to procure the engine before it was complete, didn't complete it, then they pushed a shite product out the door, way too early and way over- hyped. Keeping with the norm for Triple A titles recently.
This debacle, for lack of a better term, rests sqarly on BW's shoulders. Thay can make any excuse they want, and I am sure they have several lined up however, they had the opportunity and they flushed it in order to make the quick buck.
This is a great study on how not to produce/market a MMO. A truly amateur, poorly planned and lead endevour.
If you want a new idea, go read an old book.
In order to be insulted, I must first value your opinion.
Even if EA had been able to license the new Hero Engine as it exists today, they'd still have had to heavily modify it to do what they want.
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
True. I think my biggest issue with the way this game was designed was the time wasted on tacking on that space part. I don't see how anyone could have thought that would be passable and it would have been better to leave that for an expansion. All that time spent on making the space shooter could have been used making sure things like Ilum and Legacy were ready for launch. Just my thoughts on the subject.
Currently Playing: World of Warcraft
Suppose that you had the full source code to WoW, but none of the content. So you wouldn't have art assets, quest text, and so forth; or perhaps rather, you'd have only token amounts of them that you can use to see how the code works. But you're trying to create SWTOR, and can use whatever you want from WoW's source code to help you create your game.
If SWTOR wanted to do the same thing in the same way that WoW did, you could just grab the relevant chunk of source code and use it. But anything that SWTOR wanted to do differently from WoW would require either modifying some of the code from WoW or else scrapping the relevant code and creating your own from scratch. If SWTOR wanted to implement a feature that WoW simply didn't have, then you'd definitely have to create your own code from scratch. If WoW had a feature that SWTOR didn't want, then you'd toss out the relevant code that implemented it in WoW.
While an imperfect comparison, that's kind of like what licensing a game engine does for you. Whoever built the game engine tries to provide a bunch of stuff that would be useful for a lot of games. But they'll inevitably implement a bunch of things that you don't want, while not implementing a bunch of things that you do, simply because different games have different feature sets. Even if the game engine implements a feature and you want to implement the "same" feature at a high level, if you want to implement it differently, then you're going to have to change some things. Sometimes you have to change so many things that it's easier to just toss out the entire section of code and write your own from scratch.
One drawback of using WoW's source code as a starting point for SWTOR is that it would push SWTOR to make their game more like WoW. If WoW implemented something and SWTOR wanted to implement something kind of similar, it's more work to write their own than to simply use the source code from WoW directly. If they would have kind of liked to do it differently for SWTOR, but didn't particularly care, then they likely just use the WoW source code because they already have that, which makes it easier.
Now, obviously EA did not and does not have access to the full source code for WoW. But if a bunch of different games use the same game engine, and that game engine is set up to do things in a particular way, you can easily get a bunch of different games doing the same thing in the same way because it's what the game engine is set up for. That's not always a bad thing; if a bunch of different games have a login authentication system that works in exactly the same way because it's using exactly the same source code, so what? But when it comes to game mechanics were some variety is desirable, this can become more problematic.
Yes, because it does determine the overall performance of the final product. This isn't to say that a powerful game engine can't be bogged down, but it's no different than how a powerful car engine can be bogged down by a heavy body, power loss in the drivetrain, starved of fuel/air, or choked by too many accessories. So in some ways it's a fairly apt analogy.
But really game engines are more of a framework of features you build your game around, so more akin to a drivetrain rather than just the engine I suppose if you really want to use that metaphor.
In the case of the Hero engine from what I've read it sounds like they also included a large amount of built-in development tools. This isn't always the case though with a game engine, some just include compatibility with the more common development tools.
So if you set out to create "full voiced story driven MMO" (core stuff), you dont pick engine (or suddenly dicsover 5 years in development with bajillion of people) that your (modified engine) completely sucks exactly in "fully voiced story driven MMO" part.
Seems that devs twiddled their thumbs for 5 years until someone on dev team dared to finally mention (aka pointing enourmous pink elephant in the room everyone ignored) "but engine sucks bigtime", of course, by their claims it seems it was "too late" already because they already built half of the game.
Seems they now have only bloated code, not for any gains but because of incompetence, they probably fired devs who worked on engine, so now they dont even have anyone that can actually fix it so they just let it slide.
The extra funny part, those problems were obvious from beta, but whenever someone mentioned bad performance/probelms in any context he had pack of rabid fanbois on his back saying that "game works flawless even on toaster"
And, whoever mentioned Space Game debacle, that was outsourced (like most of stuff in SWTOR anyway).
Well Heroengine is a game engine.. you need to build the game around it but without it the game would not go.. so yes it is like a car engine..
the issue was that they picked the engine up very early on in its development and they ran into issues with that version.
Either way they cant move the blame from themeselves they made a very boring game that hardly passes for an MMO.. They chose an engine that was not ready for commercial use adn they knew that..
heroengine today its a totally different beast you just need to look at the repopulation for that..
they should just remake the game like Square-Enix is doing with FFXIV...
new FFXIV client is capable to show up 100 characters around you, only limited by graphic card. Some companies should take care of their products, Star Wars is something big.. you cant drop it so bad..
apologists for the hero engine debacle can't really avoid the fact that for MMO's its really not a good choice, its pretty plain already that without some very heavy modification to the core engine itself, which Bioware had to do, kind of wonder if they wouldnt have been lots better off just creating their own engine, for what it cost them to fix hero engine, it probably wasnt worth having, hero engine imo, is more suited to multiplayer online/lan games, rather than MMO's, and if your pointing at repopulation as evidence of the 'current' hero engines capabilities, thats another negative tbh, and only really highlights how little hero engine has improved.
The Repopulation isn't out yet, is it? If not, then it really doesn't tell you much about the Hero Engine.
The problem with licensing a game engine going awry isn't that the first thing you try to do completely fails. It's that you can get far into the project, and then discover that two things you really need conflict with each other and you can't do both without a major overhaul to things you thought you were done with.
You might think that the game is 95% done, but that last 5% to get it ready for release can be quite a doozy. I need to change this to do what I want, but changing this breaks that, so now I need to change that, too, which promptly breaks some other thing that you won't realize you broke for two weeks, at which point, you aren't even sure what broke it. Before you know it, you've created spaghetti code and don't even know what's wrong anymore.
That can happen even if you wrote your own game engine from scratch. But it's a lot easier for it to happen when you're trying to change code that you don't entirely understand than when you're trying to change code that you already understand because you wrote it yourself.
There's a big difference between:
1) You can have 100 characters around you and draw all that you need,
2) You can have 100 characters actually on your screen, not counting ones that are nearby but slightly off of your screen,
3) You can have 100 characters actually on your screen without completely killing your frame rate, even on fairly capable hardware.
4) You can have 100 different characters on your screen without killing your frame rate, as opposed to 5 different mobs and a zillion copies of them,
5) You can have 100 different characters with data that needs to constantly be updated from the server, as opposed to something that can be done purely client-side, such as an NPC who stands in the same spot forever and never moves,
6) You can have 100 players on your screen constantly moving around and attacking arbitrarily without completely killing your frame rates, and
7) You can have 100 players on your screen with independent graphics, independent movements and attacks, moving around in real-time rather than turn-based, and without killing your frame rate or overloading your Internet connection.
Any one of those is a long, long way away from implying the next. And color me skeptical that they can do #7.
http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/03/29/gdc-2013-james-ohlen-on-how-f2p-saved-swtor/
Basically this article should read "James Ohlen on how F2P saved his job" because that's really what happened imo.
I can't imagine anyone hiring him after the way they handled this game. The short amount of time for the lifting of the NDA prior to launch where the game was freely open to be reported on by the unbiased unpaid press was a clear indicator to me of just how this game was going to go. Then there was the launch patch of the game being nothing like the final beta in function and form because someone deleted something they shouldn't have. Then there was the design flaws of the game pushing the game back to a 2004 design rather then a 2012 design especially when dealing with things as simple as remote mission turnins and mission(quest) system design. And finally there is the availability of code that allows for multiple players to exist rather easily (more then 10 I know) on a pvp battlefield without destroying quality that it seems none of these developers tend to use.
If it weren't for the IP this game would have gone the way of the do do bird quickly. I am quite surprised he's still there honestly.
My understanding is that they wanted to license an engine to get started on the game faster, rather than spending quite a while creating an engine before they can create anything more than token amounts of content for the game itself. If you make your own game engine from scratch, you can't do that.
The problem is that trying to start creating anything more than token amounts of content before the engine is settled can very easily backfire. If you decide that the way you've structured something is inefficient and you need to change it because it will double your performance in that portion of the engine, then that may require restructuring the data for your content. If you only have token amounts of data to change, then maybe you can do that in ten minutes. If you've already had 20 artists working for a year and then you need to change how all of the models are done, you could end up with a cost more naturally measured in man-years rather than man-hours.
Now, doubling performance in one small part of your game engine probably doesn't mean doubling frame rates in general. It might only mean 2% less CPU load and no change in GPU load for the same final output. But 1% here and 2% there dozens of times can add up to the difference between an efficient game engine that runs well on middling hardware and a badly-coded mess that strugges to run at all.
Indeed.
It created the entire empty feeling on worlds like Coruscant, where you expect BUSY city life and not a handful of unanimated NPCs standing around like three days after the Apocalypse wiped out 99% of Coruscant's population, and the rest was nauseated! Even small towns all seemed dead and not active. Compare the GW2 cities and how alife and buzzing and real they look compared to the sterile, empty places of SWTOR. Most cities and towns in SWTOR don't even have any ambient sounds! They are totally silent!
So yes, I am totally inclined to believe it.
But there is one more thing in the Gamebreaker TV video: how this ex guy from Trion/Rift said, the classic MMO model is going to end soon? Yes. Yes it is. Developers can not make by far content that fast as players burn through it. And the ONLY reasonable answer is of course, to return to add sandbox elements. NOT a rollback to 2004 MMOs, but ADD sandbox elements ADDITIONALLY to the story.
And this is what I NEVER will understand, WHY ON EARTH SWTOR did NOT learn anything from SWG, and failed to add ANY sort of sandbox elements to keep people busy?! I don't get it. These sandbox elements were so popular in games like SWG or Ultima Online. People LOVED them. Can you imagine how cool SWTOR would have been with the present level of story PLUS sandbox elements? It would have been a killer game! And THAT is what MMOs need to do, they need to embrace the sandbox elements again! Give people stuff to do, player cities to build, full crafting economies to supply and weird non combat stuff like entertainers, musicians asf. to keep players busy beyond the quests and stories!
We few said so ALL ALONG. So we can only hope, TESO will be the last "classic" MMO as the pure themeparks are, because the future is sandbox-themeparks hybrids, and nothing else.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
I agree that the Hero Engine isn't fully to blame, but i believe it is partly to blame. It is, afterall, a major component of the whole blueprint of the design. It could be, that some coding modules were coded very terribly from the original Hero Engine team, so when the Swtor team picked up, it took them more time and money to modify it.
It's like hiring a mechanic to fix your car engine, and he modifies it very differently from the factory default. (bad analogy i know. lol.)
That maybe but that is by no means a monumental task... considering games like APB or even AoC or WAR already did it, so I doubt that FFXIV can't at least achieve some of that.
If such a medicore game like APB can do it (WITH fully customizable models mind you), I don't see how SWTOR can be doing soooo badly with just 10 people and no fully customizable cars WITH fully customizable tattoos/logos/colours/clothing or explosions or smoke effects.
the version of Heroes engine use by SWTOR must've been really terrible.
Planetside 2's environment was even more "gorgeous" (in terms of ambience lighting and graphics) and yet the engine was developed entirely in house.
Bioware probably should've developed their own engine. Might have been better off (or better yet, even make money from selling the engine to others).
One hundred players on your screen at once, moving around in real time with independent 3D graphics? Really? I'm skeptical, as that really is hard to do. It's not just that drawing 100 is hard; if you actually have 100 on your screen at once with anything other than an isometric overhead view, then you probably have an awful lot more than 100 who are close enough that the server needs to tell you where they are. You can spin the camera around awfully fast, and if you don't even start loading assets until the camera moves, it will take a while for players who are just behind you to appear.
Maybe they can do 20 players on a screen at once. Maybe they can have 100 in an area, with usually 5-10 actually on your screen at once and occasionally spiking up to 20. But 100 players on your screen at once animated independently and with independent 3D graphics, with the location of all players updated promptly in real time and without killing your frame rate? I want a YouTube video of that, and I want to count. Because I'm skeptical.
Making an engine for your own game and making an engine to license to others are two different animals. If you make an engine for your own game, then you say, I don't need this capability for my particular game, so I don't need to implement it in the engine at all. Adding more than that is just bloat that makes it harder to follow what your engine does and may harm performance. But if your game engine only has the capabilities that your particular game needs and nothing more, then no one is going to want to license it, as other engines will have a lot more of the capabilities that they need.
SWTOR learned a lot from SWG. Hence they went with the "themepark" style gameplay of WoW. Sandbox is still fringe at best, to make it more popular now would require a Heculean amount of coding to get those elements to form a more cohesive game that a majority of gamers would enjoy. Which is why you see so very few AAA sandbox titles, and the few you do see incorporate lots of linear elements for mass market appeal.
And you have to be a bit of a revisionist to look at SWG and see anything other than a flop. Sales? SWG is a pipsqueak compared to SWTOR and it was never a serious competitor to its contemporaries, also like SWTOR. Popularity? Again, SWG is tiny and was an also-ran back in the day like SWTOR is now. Innovation? Well I'd say it's got SWTOR beat here, but not by much, the main difference being SWTOR copied WoW, while SWG copied UO.
I realize it's hard to tell when you're wearing those rose-colored glasses sometimes but come on. I expect that when the next Star Wars MMO releases people will cry out, "How could you not learn anything from how awesome SWTOR was?!"
lol youre making a joke right?
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011