Bioware takes the shortcut

To me, this is like covering whether a company is going with Maya or 3DSMax to develop their 3D models. Who cares? It's the end results that matter. Same with Bioware. Their MMO will either be successful or it won't, and it won't have a thing to do with whether they bought their engine or wrote it in-house. It's all about gameplay and design.

But gameplay and design are strongly dependent on the technology, that's the point.

any criticism of Bioware is just too early

But the important things happen *now*, while we see the outcome in a few years.

But gameplay and design are strongly dependent on the technology, that's the point.

The engine, as I understand it, is pretty feature complete and highly customizable. I could be wrong. But I don't see how an in-house game engine necessarily has an advantage over a licensed engine. DAoC is a perfect example. Mythic did not write the engine (at least the client side, not sure about server side), they licensed it because quick entry into the market was important to them. And while the DAoC interface is definitely dated by today's standards, it was a much better client than EQ or UO at release. Outsourcing the engine was a major factor in the success of DAoC.

any criticism of Bioware is just too early

But the important things happen *now*, while we see the outcome in a few years.

I'll eat my words if, a few years from now, the failure of this game rests on the fact that they out-sourced the engine. I don't think that will be the case though. The success or failure of this game will depend on marketing and how fun it is to play. Success also might be determined by how quickly they can get it to market. The MMO space is crowded, and it's only going to get more crowded. The time it takes to develop a custom engine might even possibly doom the project.

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.

As I said below...none of BioWare's engines can handle the number of connections needed for an MMO. Neither Infiinity or Aurora were built with the database systems in mind that are required to build these types of games.

I think the point is that he really doesn't have any idea what the "engine" for a game really is.

For an MMO the "engine" puts the pixels on the screen, it has some system for taking your 3D models and textures and getting them into the game, it has a database system for keeping track of all of the myriad numbers that make up an MMO and, most importantly, it has the net code that allows 1000's of users to connect simultaneously and play your game. You'll notice that none of those aspects have anything to do with how your game actually plays, that's still up to you to build. So, in this case BioWare decided they'd license the 5 or so years of work that Simutronics has already put into building all of that backend crap so they could focus on creating a fun, compelling, game for people to play. Sounds like a good deal for everyone to me.

none of BioWare's engines can handle the number of connections needed for an MMO

This is obvious - those engines were written with 8 and 64 simultaneous players respectively in mind, and most times the target number was considerably less than that. However, the Infinity engine was also written to host that same game on a Pentium 200MHz (if you were lucky!) and there was no dedicated server app. The Aurora engine had a dedicated server app, but if you look at its interface (at least the one originally supplied by Bioware) it was really intended for a small group to play a single module at a time if they happened to have a spare box sitting around rather than running a full-fledged Persistent World. Having said that, the NWN PW server I occasionally play on often has upwards of 60 simultaneous users with no noticeable lag, and that hardware is not enterprise-grade by any means.

So perhaps my "minor tweaks" comment should be re-written as "write a new network layer with optimizations for dedicated hardware and massive-scale multiple connections" but this could likely be done on a coffee break or two. ;)

Now, as for your idea of HeroEngine being exclusively a graphics/database/networking engine, I would refer you to their website where among other things is mentioned their "revolutionary HeroBlade™ tool" which "allows for large teams to collaborate in real-time" and "give your GameMasters the power to ... run creatures, become NPCs and even orchestrate events in a live game", their "Next Gen Windows Client", and "HeroScript™, a proprietary language built from the ground up for the unique challenges of MMO development".

Of course they are promising "complete creative control", but how could they? The client is pre-written (and Windows-only), which limits the UI to a particular style of gameplay. For example, consider the UI differences between DDO and Eve Online - both MMORPGs, but one very fast-paced, visceral and action-oriented and the other more slow-paced, strategic and cerebral. The toolkit for both content management and interaction - supposedly based on the game client - is also pre-written, which limits the ways your support team and GMs can interact with the game environment. Lastly, the scripting language is pre-defined, and anyone familiar with Aurora modding can testify to the enormous capabilities that were opened up every time Bioware came out with a new patch to NWN with just a few new scripting commands. It is possible that HeroScript™ can be easily extended with new functions, but it will still limit the developer to a certain mode of thinking that may not be a good fit for the game in question.

Aurora had some issues that had to be worked around to run a PW, yes - but that was largely because Aurora was not intended as an engine for a PW. The community did fantastic work with hacking together database bindings and dedicated server improvements, not to speak of the actual custom content added to the game itself. Bioware was late in introducing the server-hopping capabilities that CoPaP, among others, now make use of to mitigate the 64-simul-players issue. If server-hopping and database bindings had been present from the start, there's no telling where Aurora and NWN would have gone in the MMO/PW space, or how that would have affected the industry.

That's the sort of revolution I was hoping for from Bioware with this new project, and which I suspect will not happen partly because of this 3rd-party lock-in process. I hope they prove me wrong.

Why expend a large chunk of your development budget on someone else's toolkit?

There are many benefits to outsourcing, and there are many benefits to outsourcing technology. For example, the cost of a third-party technology investment is outweighed by the benefit of decreased expenditures to be accrued in the long term, including costs related to development, testing, and support.

Just to note: Gordon Walton, Rich Vogel, and Damion Schubert doesn't make for a "Studio without experience."

Yes, that's what I meant. I just didn't find a good way to explain.

Basically those guys bring the "old" where the "new" was instead welcome. While in that team I don't see much of Bioware, which is where the "old" (as a standard of quality) was instead welcome.

Basically I'm advocating for a Bioware studio that is indeed Bioware and NEW to the genre. Instead of a Bioware studio that of Bioware only carries the name and behind which instead hide just the same old faces.

Same guys wearing new hats? I don't buy that.

Are we in the entertainment business, or the technology business?

Entertainment through technology, imho. I like a lot new technology when it is aimed at something. I don't like instead technology without a purpose.

If you remember that last comment you write you know how I really don't care about "cutting-edge", because I consider WoW cutting edge, as I explained. Because it serves a purpose wonderfully. And because they have the most polished engine, despite you and other people dismiss it as trivial just because you think the models have a low polycount.

I can understand if a small company takes that "shortcut" because or you go down that path, or you just sit and stare (actually 90% of the smaller companies are made just of tech guys who have no clue about how to make a game but just finish to develop technology for years, till they give up). But for a bigger studio I think that investing to build your own technology and tools is *required*, not optional. Technology is an "enabler". You can do nothing without it.

So we are always in the same scenario: "I wish this would be possible, but it isn't."

Games should also bring forward that goal. Make possible today what yesterday wasn't. This ALSO happen through development at a low level. As a designer you WANT things to happen. You can workaround the limits to an extent, but this is a race to lower the bar, not to rise it. You continue to amputate your ideas just because you know that things aren't possible with what you have available.

Take my idea on the server distribution. That's just not possible if you don't push the technology yourself. I thought it from the design perspective, to achieve PURE design goals and not to show pretty effects on screen. But it's still not possible if you buy an engine developed by someone else and don't work on that technology by yourself. Take Guild Wars and the way it is built, the whole server infrastructure, the streaming technology and all the rest. That game just couldn't exist if they were going to buy an engine.

To not consider that the great majority of games built on non proprietary technology finish also to be very buggy and with an awful performance because the programmers have no deep knowledge about it and have to adapt to those problem (the original memory leak in DAoC that corrupted the graphic is a perfect example).

In particular for a mmorpg project that is planned to last, not having a direct control over your technology and what is possible to do with it, is already a quite consistent limit. The technology that you develop is a capital, the technology you buy is just an expense.

So you can take the shortcut and arrive sooner to the point. But this also means that what you can do with it is also strongly limited and the technology will become obsolete soon, along with your game. Or you can take the longer and harder path and develop all you need from scratch, tailored exactly around your needs, like a progressive investment that will only show its value in the longer term.

I can see how often you don't have that choice. But I would also assume that the bigger studios have a bit of more freedom.

Infinity is an extremely outdated engine and the multiplayer code is a mess.

Aurora is still a decent engine and I think you'll see with NWN2 that it can be adapted to give stunning visuals. The problem is that it's just not built to handle persistent worlds. Sure there are persistent world NWN mods out there but just ask the teams behind them how much hacking they had to do to make them work. Even with all of that, beyond 20-30 players they start to bog down.

Infinity is an extremely outdated engine and the multiplayer code is a mess.

Of course you cannot take the multiplayer code of Baldur's Gate to make a MMO, come on. It would be the silliest ideas ever heard.

The press release actually doesn't specify what exactly Bioware bought. If the rendering engine, or the server code. I was planning to write even about that, but I forgot.

My own idea at the bottom was just about the client, that's kind of obvious. And I was assuming that Bioware had enough resources to build their own server code and technology. For sure it doesn't look like a good idea to buy that kind of tech from a company that has NEVER tested it to see if it works.

As one of the very FEW people whom have had the experiance of actually using this software let me tell you that it kicks ass. :D

Wasn't Counterstrike free?