I don't want them to scrap all the graphics, but those are the major points. Just use less vibrant colors and higher resolution textures, and reshape the bodies a bit to look less cartoony (male hands are huuuuge). More polygons for bodies and armor would be nice, too. You see your character all the time, so it deserves a little more love than the rest.

That would make it still look fine years down the road, but would be easier distinguishable from other fantasy MMOs.

You believe that story? A unfinished version of the hero engine used to create a unfinished product by unskilled programmers? To be exact... HUNDREDS of unskilled programmers?

The problem ist SW:ToR is not the only game created with the hero engine.

Look at brilliant examples like this:
http://www.heroengine.com/spotlights/faxion-online/
or this.
http://www.heroengine.com/spotlights/dominus/

The characters are looking in the exact same way very strange than sw:tor. The Interface is nearly the same too. A few other textures on the ui, but the handling looks and feels similar. The leveldesign (tube-levels) is also very similar. And the graphics are as bad as the one of sw:tor(even worse). So why... if its so easily possible... is there not a SINGLE example of a game with good graphics? Not even a vocking tech demo!

What other things do you need to stop believing marketing lies?

while the art style chosen for TESO is not dependent on the engine used, there ARE visual elements that are dependent on the engine. One of the most important features of this type is the rendering/view distance. Skyrim has superb viewing distance. Hero engine, iirc from SWTOR, was prone to clipping not very far off from the camera. This is going to be an issue, if the improved Hero engine cannot handle large view distances.

We're getting tab-target hotkey based combat, right?

Lets put to rest the arguments that we're still living on 28.8 modems and it's not possible. It's 100% a design decision.


HEROENGINE ADVANTAGES

• Live Collaborative Development — From one or many geographic locations – everyone works online, live on the server so you can share your work instantly.
  
• No Nightly Builds — Create your game in real-time and get instant feedback on your work.
  
• No Assumptions or Restrictions — HeroEngine lets you build your game in your own style and we provide the core technology so you don’t need to reinvent it.
  
• Reference Worlds — Access to reference worlds of typical online games (social, FPS ect), complete with example code.
  
• Integrated World-Class Middleware — SpeedTree^?, Umbra dPVS, FaceGen, FMOD^? and more world-class tools and support

The irony of a building kit like LEGO is, that it will always look and feel like LEGO.

The same goes for the hero engine. Its a building block system. What we know from sw:tor will also happen in TESO.

This sounds an awful lot like the "Oblivion with Guns" argument people had when Fallout 3 was being developed...

Yeah, just like all programs developed with Visual Studio are the same...

Visual Studio is not LEGO. Visual Studio is a huge industrial toolset! You can create everything, but not as easy as with LEGO. The downsite is that LEGO is sometimes a little bit limited, when it comes to give your products a custom touch. Like dont looking like LEGO at all.

So is the Unreal Engine, Source Engine, Hero Engine, etc. Difference being Hero Engine has a bunch of stuff built in so you can avoid writing from scratch the really complex network code and such an MMO needs.

And the LEGO engine sdk! Yes, you are right! They are all equally powerful, scalable, customizable... NOT!

They kind of are, yeah. Don't take my word for it though, get the SDK for $99. Yes, $99, you can put any custom crap you want in there. It's how Bioware mangled it so bad and took it down from what I've seen in dominus (400 players on screen) to studdering with 20. Or, it could just be that the newer version of it is *that much better* from a built in networking standpoint than the beta version SWTOR was built on.

400 players on screen with Graphics from 2004 is not so hard i think. Dominus does really look exceptionally ugly.

But its a good example for what im talking about. The UI, the faces, the zone design, the trees... everything remembers me about SW:ToR. Thats the problem with building block systems. The outcome is always somewhat similar.

So does TESO.

$99 gets you HeroCloud - you're tied to Idea Fabrik's servers. And it isn't source code level - for example, $99 also gets you a commercial license for UDK, but for the real power behind it you need source access - for which you pay substantially more for (UnrealEngine 3). I'd say HeroEngine proper is, ala UE3, substantially more expensive.

And note that's $99 per year for HeroCloud. And they keep 30% of all revenue you make.

I know all this, I'm assuming people like Bethesda got the source access. Point being with the 99$ "Herocloud" I can make a first person game and let players build houses without even having that flexibility...so, yeah. I'm Joe Average business software developer. Hearing professional game devs can't top my achievements doesn't make me feel like god's gift to using toolkits that do most of the work for you. They make me think there is alot of dishonesty going on.

/eg: Be honest about your design decisions, don't call them technical hurdles when they clearly AREN'T.

I believe this thread will be sent to the Hero Engine discussion thread.

It's more about the dishonesty of the spin on the design decisions than it is the engine in particular. Similar functionality can be found in most other mainline middleware. We've been past the technical problems preventing realtime MMO's for years. The decision not to use such systems is solely to attract WoW players and gear2win types of people. Now that's it to the point a small team of indy devs can crank out a realtime sandbox game in 15 months on middleware like the Hero Engine, you must ask why a 300M game with 250 professional devs has too many "technical problems" with it.

I think a lot of people talking about engines and graphics really don't know what an engine is.

I like how you are taking the box bullets for HeroEngine and trying to derive some snark from it. That bullet is clearly geared at small shops / enthusiasts who want to pick up and play with the engine.

For a big studio though, the only bullet that really matters is the last one.

However, that outlook fails to address that 2-4 people using such a toolkit can make a game described in GI as technically unfeasable by the TES:O devs without modifying the source code in the exact engine they are using by customizing reference scripting and design schemas provided with the toolkit. If an enthusiast with 99$ and no source access can build something, why can't 250 professionals with 300 million? The enthusiast/indy projects usually end up being unattractive games for 1 reason. No money, meaning crappy art/sound/animation/QA. Indy projects often have mechanics miles beyond what we're seeing in AAA MMO's that spend every ounce of their resources on those things, and just copy/paste mechanics from from WoW due to investor risk aversion.

All I'd like to see is, "We decided more theme park content and voiceovers were a far greater value add than fiddling with hitboxes and animation fluidity on a bunch of mob types." That's really the driver, not "technical limitations." Falling into the derp trap of thinking you can out-theme park World of Warcraft, or even that ES fans want a big "theme park" instead of a dynamic world with familiar (to the ES series) game mechanics.

Hero Engine = TOTAL FAIL!!!!!! jesus i was not getting the game anyways but now i know its being developed with this ....ahhhhhhh pass!!!! I really feel bad they are gonna mess up my almost perfect get-away world of TES!!!! and i think this is the reason most of us are all freaked out.

I think you think you know a lot about Hero Engine, probably because of SWTOR. I recommend you hold off and see the game in action and also see some interviews with some more devs before you make sure of your "pass" on the game. Remember, and Engine is just a set of tools. What the devs do with it can vary wildly based on talent, and proper planning. The devs at Bioware did not have large scale pvp in mind as they began their game's creation. The devs at ZOS did. I think you'll see a pretty dramatic difference in performace between this game and SWTOR. Let's wait and see.

This 100%.

The gamebryo engine was always thought to be a really horrible engine and was always one of the largest points of contention when it came to new TES games, but we didn't have any problems loving them. The same engine that created our beloved TES games was used to make some absolutely horrid games, the same can be done with HeroEngine.

Well as a matter of fact im not an expert on this or anything close but looking to the engine's history and the released games developed by it( only two entries so far for an angine that has been around since 2006) and both games were not immpresive at all "faxions online" managed a fair score and took a lot of critics for the dinamics (engine related) and well SWTOR we all know its been a total failure. But i agree with your statement that its not only the posibilities the engine has to offer but the talent and the utilization from the developers its what dictates the final product but statistics are there to look at it dont you think......thanks for your replay...

The same engine used to make our beloved TES games was also used to make a LOT of absolutely horrible games as well, so drop the Hero Engine crap.


Also i don't see how a game with over a million subs is a total fail.