Hero Engine: why?

Bioware has the whole engine in their hands to extend, it'll turn out just fine

Fullscreen at 1920 x 1080

Actually, if TOR flops it'll be the last subscription based mmo of this size you'll probably ever see. No one will fund them anymore. If a franchise like Star Wars and a developer like BioWare can flop so hard then who besides Blizzard will be able to make another major MMO happen?

Unfortunately, nobody. Blizzard is the only one it seems that truly understands MMO's. Looking forward to Titan.

For me, it's not about the bugs that make this engine disappointing. I can't really pinpoint what bugs are engine related, and I'm not going to try and blame any bugs on the engine.

From a hardware support standpoint however, the engine is quite embarrassing though. We're in 2011. Simultaneous multi-threading debuted in consumer processors in 2002. Dual cores have been around in consumer products since 2005. Either way you look at it, 9 years or 6, it's just plain bad. That's a terribly long time in the tech world. Unfortunately, it's a giant plague in the software industry, and gaming industry in particular.

DirectX 10 has been around since 2006. There's no support for taking advantage of the aforementioned API, which happens to be more efficient. DirectX 11, which offers around a 50% performance improvement over DX9 at the same graphical settings, has been around 2009. Now, I believe Bioware has talked about potentially adding support for these in the future, and I very, very much would like it if they did. But right now, it's not here. There are performance issues abound, and a lot of these would be alleviated if the HeroEngine was remotely compliant with industry standards that have been around for years.

Now, I'm not blaming Bioware for this. I'm simply saying from a technical standpoint, this engine sucks. When the HeroEngine gets multithreading support in the future, I hope it makes its way to TOR in a timely manner.

1) The engine is customised from stock. This means the ability lag caused by waiting for an animation to finish before starting the new one can be fixed. This does not mean however that it will be fixed, the whole animation style and flow from one move to another is quite possibly an active design decision made around the game's aesthetics. What could happen here is that some moves will interrupt animations (primarily interrupts and other off-GCD abilities) and others won't - but we shall have to see BioWare's response when it comes.

2) The GFX in this game are, like WoW, highly stylised. This is a design decision modelled on the animated series and has most likely been made to allow the GFX to run smoothly on lower end systems with as little loss of quality as possible. On a personal note: I really do quite like the art style.

3) Memory leaks: can and will be fixed eventually, see point 1.

4) GFX are not the be-all and end-all of the reasons to choose a game engine. Server architecture, network useage, asset pipeline, development tools and a whole slew of other factors need to be assessed. If you think BioWare chose the Hero Engine based purely on a sales pitch of "Hey we can all play together in a big sandbox to make a game!" then you are being, quite frankly, ignorant. Did a little test the other day, in 10 hours of constant gameplay the network useage added up to just under 125Mb combined upstream and downstream, this alone is a remarkable figure! It worked out averaging 1.4kBps down and 600Bps up over the play session, so theoretically (discounting other issues related to the hardware) you could play this game on a 56.6k modem.

But, as with all MMORPG's since time began, when there is a public forum to discuss the game there will be people ringing the death knell and saying the game is doomed, the engine sucks and worst "fix it now or I will quit". You know what, for the good of the game and the community why don't you save your post and sod off. Leave the game to those of us that want to play the game and have fun!

Can I have some crack? I run full settings and there's always dark face and the shadowing is not correct. The game looks like crap. Don't look at environment, yes it looks great. The player themselves look like crap.

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