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The dawning of the NICHE MMORPG. A new age begins. Or not.
Ihmotepp
Member Posts: 14,495
http://mmorpgmaker.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=10467
An indie version of the Hero Engine is soon to be released. For those that don't know, Hero Engine was used to make The Old Republic. It's a AAA mmoprg engine.
It seems that the HE will come with a stock game to modify, called Hero's Journey.
Price is yet to be determined, but it will definitely be under 10K.
No engine makes it easy to turn out the artwork needed for an MMORPG. So you may see a lot of stock artwork, and a lot of Hero's Journey clones.
But if that happens, you can modify the game with a few simple changes. A few changes, and it's a perma death game. A few changes and it's solo friendly, group friendly, FFA PvP.
You can run a roleplay only server, and kick everyone off that doesn't roleplay.
You can make leveling take years. Or minutes.
Sure, at first most will be crap.
But people have made great mods, why not great MMORPGs with the HE?
And that's just boneheads that buy the engine to make their own MMORPG.
What about real (small) development companies that get the indie version? Again, artwork will still take time and money, but 10K (or less) for the engine that was used for TOR?
You know what that means right? You don't have to get WoW numbers to make a profit.
I could be wrong, and it won't happen over night, but I think we're going to enter the age of teh Niche MMORPG. Developers shooting for 50K subs, not 11 million.
that means they can say, this game is for a specific audience, and the rest of you can screw off, we're not making the game for you, and we're not trying to compete with WoW.
Comments
The question is are there any ongoing royalties. If i was the makers of that engine i would try and sneak maybe 10% royalties off the games made. Considering how many subs MMO's get that's quite a bit of money.
MMO wish list:
-Changeable worlds
-Solid non level based game
-Sharks with lasers attached to their heads
The indie version isn't released yet, so the actual license agreement isn't available, but I'm sure there will be royalties.
It COULD be that the royalties are a deal breaker for some people, but we just dont' know till we see it.
Interesting post.
It would certainly be a good way for the MMO industry to find out what kind of markets really do exist, and in what quantities. If, as you pointed out, they were able to test features such as perma-death, and certain types of FFA PVP without having to invest in the development of a whole game/engine we could be in for some interesting and groundbreaking releases.
Lets hope so anyway!
Which Final Fantasy Character Are You?
Final Fantasy 7
I could be really wrong, but I think people will do with this thing LEGALLY what they do ILLEGALLY with WoW emulators.
I've never played WoW emulators, but I understand lots of them change all the rules, like ad more loot drops for example, and they are very popular.
I don't really want to play an illegal emu, but it would be fun to play legal games like that.
So is it pretty much what Epic did with UE3?
Indies have been around for decades, some here may have played or are playing the games. CCP ring a bell?
M59, UO, EQ1, WWIIOL, PS, EnB, SL, SWG. MoM, EQ2, AO, SB, CoH, LOTRO, WoW, DDO+ f2p's, Demos & indie alpha's.
What happened to Hero's Journey anyway, I was kind of looking forward to that.
It was basically a marketing ploy to sell the engine.
-Letting Derek Smart work on your game is like letting Osama bin Laden work in the White House. Something will burn.-
-And on the 8th day, man created God.-
If the engine is versatile, it could be great for development of alternative mmo's.
I myself would not mind a 10% royalty as long the engine itself is free of cost,I might then be e tempted to try get some peeps togheter to try make a mmo based on the many ideas I've in my head.
At the moment I am broke so I can't afford to buy it, maybe once I start selling books I may have some money.
Thats just engine...Thats like 30% of what MMO is.
Building a game out of just engine is far different from building a mod to an existing game.
Which is why many people are excited about the HE, because supposedly it will come with Heroes Journey, which you can mod.
How so? Depends on what that engine can do really. Making a decent mod should take about as much time investment as working on a decent engine.
The problem is that people wont play crap. Access to an engine at low cost is great, but many of the mmo's coming out are failing on alot of fronts (gameplay, graphics, expectations, etc). Similar to UE3 the engine is just the start, coding, graphics, gameplay, animation, AI, UI, et al. become issues now.
As it is described in the OP, this is exactly the way MU* went many many years ago. Its yet another example of how MMOs are folloing the path that MU took
Torrential: DAOC (Pendragon)
Awned: World of Warcraft (Lothar)
Torren: Warhammer Online (Praag)
Isn't there an engine that is already marketed to indy developers?
.
I don't remember the name of it.
.
Like $300
.
Why is hte hero engine better?
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
I have to agree with this as well. Servers, support, models/art (at least anything new) will add to the bottem line.
Its a lot more work that we players give devs credit for
Torrential: DAOC (Pendragon)
Awned: World of Warcraft (Lothar)
Torren: Warhammer Online (Praag)
The bigger engines want to move in on the indie engines (Unity/Torque) because they realize the market for it now.
I doubt there would be any extra fees, the real way these companies make thier money is by making it sound like anyone can pick up an engine, modify it to their needs, and realease a working/quality game. Yet 99% of the people who buy these engines will never release a single product = free money for them without the competition.
I'm all for as many different indie engine options as there are, since that means they will all be forced to be more useable and more robust, I just hate to see people thinking that with no major programming experience, no art abilities, no game development experiece, thinking they will pick up one of these engines and release the game of their dreams.
Start small and get some programming books and work with 2D before going into 3D. Try out some things like Flash or XNA. Once you get a handle on those start learning to make your own simplistic 3D engine that interacts with either OpenGL or DirectX. Then once you've gotten all that done, and you either know a texture/model artist that you can work with (or can do it yourself) then shell out the money for one of these engines. Far less likely to feel defeated and that you wasted your money.
No it wasn't. I had a friend who worked on the volunteer development team as a programmer. They were trying something never done before - a game made by amateurs using their game creation engine. It was to be a full game, but they were behind schedule on it. I witnessed much of the finished product at my friend's house and it looked to be a very cool world/game. It was not just a ploy, but was to be an actual game. I believe the company was too far behind schedule, and they simply saw the potential in making more money off the engine than the actual game. At the time, it was funding the production of this game in fact. Eventually, they just cut their losses and abandoned the project.
Also, Hero Engine is a VERY comprehensive PROFESSIONAL game development engine. It is not bare bones, and it is not a toy, like many of these other 'game developing tools'. It is a fully functional product, which one has to LEARN to use. It has a complete quest-building system, pathing, graphics, effects, combat mechanics, sounds. It is practically all you would need to build a game, combined with a couple other middleware products to tweak things as you like and give the game your own feel.
From what I have read, BW luved utilizing it in early stages.
As time went on, however, I guess it has slowed the development with so many devs being involved(something about any changes needs the whole game code re-compiled....or something to that effect,). Basically the way I understood it is that the process isnt modular.
For a company not intending on dumping a plethora of millions into a game though, this would probably be ideal.
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
Well, it’s true about trying to pick up the indie market. A lot of vendors that have been catering to AAA studios for years are noticing the exponential growth of indie devs over the past few years. Yes even AAA studios don’t do all their own in-house work but use 3rd party code/art and deploy it into their projects. So these vendors have been bringing costs down to sell in volume rather than sell high to a select few.
Of course don’t get the impression that all these devs are know-nothing kids. See the college course catalog the past few years? it’s swamped with classes for game developers now, of all ages, and those classes are very popular. Not just programming, but the whole spectrum of development focuses. I mean keep in mind that our industries are fluctuation a lot with the economic recession (or depression), and some of those jobs are gone forever (a topic all in itself). So people have been learning new things, whether it be game specific or related to the field in some way.
It’s not just the way the MU* went, much of that went to hobby developers. What is going on is a flood of people coming into a healthy industry, one that is larger than the movie industry in regards to the whole of the game industry. Of course mmo’s are going to get a lot of attention by the new developers; as often is the case, piracy hurts, especially the start-up game studios. I mean I go into Target, and there are more indie titles than AAA, but looking on the internet all those games are heavily pirated. Of course that hurts everyone, as then those that make the games have less to buy goods and services from others, and others from you. But making them on-line games, it cuts down potential piracy, just as Steve Jobs said everything will go to one day, even our word processor apps.
Making a game is harder than moding one, yes, especially when you are stuck with the tools they provide with the game. However, regular tools have become far more sophisticated, and 10-20x faster than 10 years ago. How many devs did EQ have, like 60? If that was the number, I’ve heard that before but don’t know it’s validity, but the way things are now it could be done with 10 or less simply due to the tool factor, and then not needing to code everything from scratch, just like AAA‘s do now. Of course if it is an internet based team, that adds more difficulty than all being in person. But even that is changing as more people get these skills form local colleges and network with people they meet there.
So yeah, lots to come. And really, the Hero engine isn’t some turning point, this has been going on for years. But it's good to have more options and things to research for development.
M59, UO, EQ1, WWIIOL, PS, EnB, SL, SWG. MoM, EQ2, AO, SB, CoH, LOTRO, WoW, DDO+ f2p's, Demos & indie alpha's.