I imagine his point is that Bioware already has a number of engines (and developers extremely familiar with those engines) which would work just fine for building an MMO with some minor tweaking. Why expend a large chunk of your development budget on someone else's toolkit, and then have to build in-house expertise with that toolkit from scratch to make use of it, when you already own several?
Also, HeroEngine is not just pretty polygons, according to the press release - it is a "complete integrated platform for development of massively multiplayer online (MMO) roleplaying games (RPGs)". I think we're all hoping that Bioware, as an experienced studio with multiple mega-hits, will show us the next revolution in MMORPGs with their much-hyped secret title. If they can do that by using someone else's canned toolkit, it'd be like Andy Warhol showing us the next revolution in art by using an Etch-A-Sketch.
Re: Bioware takes the shortcut
I imagine his point is that Bioware already has a number of engines (and developers extremely familiar with those engines) which would work just fine for building an MMO with some minor tweaking. Why expend a large chunk of your development budget on someone else's toolkit, and then have to build in-house expertise with that toolkit from scratch to make use of it, when you already own several?
Also, HeroEngine is not just pretty polygons, according to the press release - it is a "complete integrated platform for development of massively multiplayer online (MMO) roleplaying games (RPGs)". I think we're all hoping that Bioware, as an experienced studio with multiple mega-hits, will show us the next revolution in MMORPGs with their much-hyped secret title. If they can do that by using someone else's canned toolkit, it'd be like Andy Warhol showing us the next revolution in art by using an Etch-A-Sketch.