Ashes of Creation is upgrading to Unreal Engine 5

Kumapon

Steven Sharif announced today that Ashes will be upgrading to UE 5. 




I'm all for this move to UE5, just not going to be able to play till my 80's...lol

delete5230

Graphics are the downfall of mmorpgs.

They would go bankrupt and fail before summitting and the people would agree to this.  

MMOExposed

yeah not pressed about graphics in a MMO. 

GatsuZerk

If graphics didn't matter, everyone who enjoys PvP would still be playing DAoC.

You can claim graphics don't matter until you're blue in the face, but the fact is... they do matter.

Quizzical

GatsuZerk said:

If graphics didn't matter, everyone who enjoys PvP would still be playing DAoC.

You can claim graphics don't matter until you're blue in the face, but the fact is... they do matter.

Different people have different preferences in PVP mechanics.  So no, some people who enjoy PVP wouldn't be playing DAoC even if it had by far the best graphics of any game on the market.

Slapshot1188

GatsuZerk said:

If graphics didn't matter, everyone who enjoys PvP would still be playing DAoC.

You can claim graphics don't matter until you're blue in the face, but the fact is... they do matter.

DAoC has a network code issue.   That is far more important than the graphics.  Put in new Net Code and some content and I'll play it.  Even with the old graphics.

DigDuggy

Of course graphics matter.  Everyone has preferences even if they aren't the primary or even deciding factor.  My problem is that often if not always, upgrading engines causes delays, problems, or issues.  Let's hope this goes smooth.

TheDalaiBomba

GatsuZerk said:

If graphics didn't matter, everyone who enjoys PvP would still be playing DAoC.

You can claim graphics don't matter until you're blue in the face, but the fact is... they do matter.

It's not the graphics.  Runescape has plenty of players.  Minecraft is one of the most popular games in the industry.

The UI?  The quest design?  Archaic.

TheDalaiBomba

tzervo said:

TheDalaiBomba said:

It's not just the graphics.  Runescape has plenty of players.  Minecraft is one of the most popular games in the industry.

The UI?  The quest design?  Archaic.

("just" added by me) put that word there and I totally agree.

That's fair.  Graphics will always play a role, because we're visual creatures.  We depend upon sight as our primary way of taking in new stimuli.

But the idea that MMORPG players will refuse to play a good MMORPG solely because of graphics seems erroneous considering how well the titles I mentioned, as well as things like WoW Classic, do in today's market.

Kyleran

Slapshot1188 said:

GatsuZerk said:

If graphics didn't matter, everyone who enjoys PvP would still be playing DAoC.

You can claim graphics don't matter until you're blue in the face, but the fact is... they do matter.

DAoC has a network code issue.   That is far more important than the graphics.  Put in new Net Code and some content and I'll play it.  Even with the old graphics.

Well, that and a more modernized UI would be nice.

nurso

Slapshot1188 said:

DAoC has a network code issue.   That is far more important than the graphics.  Put in new Net Code and some content and I'll play it.  Even with the old graphics.

Welcome to Camelot Unchained

(To be fair, CU is only inspired by DAoC)

Quizzical

Why do people seem to think that a game engine is only about graphics?

Scot

Quizzical said:

GatsuZerk said:

If graphics didn't matter, everyone who enjoys PvP would still be playing DAoC.

You can claim graphics don't matter until you're blue in the face, but the fact is... they do matter.

Different people have different preferences in PVP mechanics.  So no, some people who enjoy PVP wouldn't be playing DAoC even if it had by far the best graphics of any game on the market.

Either can be a show stopper, my minimum graphics requirements for a MMO is current day Lotro, which I don't think of as high. My minimum requirements for PvP are far harder to sum up, three factions is the start.

Cleffy

Simply switching engines doesn't make a huge difference, especially if it's something like going from one unreal version to another. If a developer is using a 3rd party engine, changing versions does a couple things for the developer. It gives them access to new tools that could make game creation easier. It removes some processes from the pipeline that will ease development. It allows them to introduce different shader technology that may make it easier to achieve certain results. It may run more efficiently depending on the improvements to the engine.

If the base assets of the game don't change, there should not be a significant difference to the visuals in the game. However, the developer could spend significantly less time achieving those results. For a persistent game, it should be expected that the engine version will change. Iterative improvements to an engine tend to lead to bloat. Every once in a while, the code needs to be cleaned up leading to a new version. If it's possible to shift a game to a new version of the same engine, there should be little reason not to.

Cleffy

I just assume developers will modularize their code.

Dibdabs

If I have paid out for a very good gaming PC I want to see games companies pull their fingers out and make the game reflect the fact that people aren't running games on Commodore 64's and Intellivision consoles any more.  

Quizzical

How hard it is to change from an older version of tools to a newer version depends tremendously on what the tools changed.

At one extreme, you can have a situation where all of the old stuff still exists with the same interface, and the newer version added more libraries that you can call and/or offered better implementations of some things that were in the old version.  The latter could mean anything from bug fixes to better optimization.

If that's the case, then the only real reasons not to upgrade to the new version are the little bit of time that it takes to install and the risk that the new version will introduce some bugs that break things that previously worked.  Compilers often fit in this extreme case, but considering how many Unreal games haven't announced an upgrade, I'd assume that it's not in this situation.

At the other extreme, a new version of a software package can be really a different engine entirely that only uses the same name as the previous for marketing reasons.  It can want everything to be structured very differently, and change the interface on all sorts of library calls.

If that's the case, then switching engines is a really dumb thing to do unless you're very early in the project.  It's going to take a massive amount of work to redo everything to fit the new engine.  And it's not just changing code; you have to debug it all over again, too.

This isn't a binary situation, and there can be a lot of things somewhere in between those options.  I don't know where switching versions of the Unreal engine lands.

Kyleran

Quizzical said:

Why do people seem to think that a game engine is only about graphics?

Perhaps because they aren't game developers?

Well also maybe it's because graphics tend to be the much promoted improvements when such changes are announced, since what gamer really cares about how much easier it makes development?