I have read articles that suggest that ZOS is using the Hero Engine to build this game. I'm not an expert, but I've heard many rumors that what caused the terrible performance in SWTOR was the fact that they too used the Hero Engine, and it was incapable of rendering many player characters at once, even on high end systems.

Are any of you experts in the field? Could this be because Bioware implemented it badly, and it isn't the fault of the Engine? If this is the case, then I have great hopes for TES Online, because I know Matt Firor has some very talented people on his team who know what they are doing. Plus, I believe they had the plan to have open world PVP from the start; I can't imagine they would stick with an engine that would prohibit large scale battles.

Hero Engine is bad, I hope this isn't the engine they are using.
I would rather have they make their own engine, heh.

What games use HERO engine? I have never heard of it. Could someone also please desribe to me what an Engine is? yeah I know, I should know that

I'd rather they stick with their current one. Rift uses it as well, so it can be adapted for MMOs.

Developing an AAA quality game engine for MMOs takes a lot of time. A lot of time

The engine is basically the core code of the game. It's used for graphics, setting up quests, etc.

Star Wars: The Old Republic is one game that uses the HERO Engine.

Do you speak from experience? Why would two huge budget games go with a "bad" engine? Is it possible to only use parts of an engine package? How much can a developer change an engine from it's base form? Is it possible that the two games started with a similar engine 5 years ago and are now very very different?

It was announced that ZOS licensed the HeroEngine back in 2007

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16368

If we get news that this game will be using Hero Engine, just look at the performance of SWTOR, awful awful for many, just too many.
Edit: Oh crap

Edit 2: Didn't Blizzard make their own engine for WoW?

And no other game did? Does that mean it will look the same as The Old Republic only TES? I saw screenshots of ToR never was keen on the visuals

1. N/A
2. Many companies do stupid things.
3. Depends on the contract with the engine's company.
4. See above.
5. The engine that Skyrim's was derived from is the same one used for Rift, and both games are obviously quite dissimilar.

Give it a few years, performance won't be an issue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeroEngine#Games_developed_using_HeroEngine

It may. It depends. You may notice some similarities, but many things can be altered between games using the same engine.



They adapted the third-party engine they used for Warcraft III(A RTS with some multiplayer features) and made it so it could be used for an MMO.

Strictly speaking, TOR didn't use HERO engine, at least not a complete version of it. The idiots at Bioware took a half-finished engine as it was and built a game on it. Then neglected to finish it.

I'm going to give ZOS the benefit of the doubt. I think they are smart enough to make sure the game performs they way they want it before they start to go public like this. I have a strong feeling that they intended for large open world, 3 faction pvp to be taking place, and they wouldn't stay silent for 5 years and just now come public if the engine wasn't handling what they want it to handle.

In my case, I didn't experience any low frame rate / performance issues with the TOR beta. It did seem that many of the assets were relatively low res and low poly.


Great point!

Why don't they just make their own engine called ZOSEGE ( Zenimax Online Studios Expert Game Engine, and the name totally isn't a ripoff off of Rockstar's RAGE (Rockstar Advanced Game Engine))

Making your own engine from scratch for a AAA game is difficult, at best, impossible at worst.

Damn. With HeroEngine, I don't believe we will be able to do things we did in The Elder Scrolls..

Trivial question here: what is a hero engine?

The engine SWTOR MMO run on and there was another MMO that shut down after few months. That's all.
It's a engine being sold to those who buy. I'm not impressed at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeroEngine

The game engine is the underlying code that game companies use to build their games off of. It handles all of the backend stuff, as well as graphics.



Don't be so quick to condemn TESO. Some things will have to be sacrificed for the MMO format, but not everything. I'm unsure of exactly what Zenimax's contract with the makers of HeroEngine is, but I'm assuming they can gently alter it so that it suits their purposes.

Example: Rift and Oblivion use the same engine. Compare them.


All TES games have been based off of another company's game engine.

Two biggest misconceptions about engines.

1. It will look like X game that also uses X engine: False, this is entirely up to the modelers and concept artists

2. It will perform like X game that also uses X engine: False, there are many different ways for developers to use an engine, not to mention many factors that can affect "performance" that have nothing to do with the engine.

So knowing what engine this game will use really doesn't tell us jack. If you start complaining about how X game works because it uses X engine your just going to look like a [censored] that doesn't know what he/she is talking about. It all boils down to the developers themselves, its perfectly possible for two games to use similar core coding and run and look completely different.

I thought the Hero Engine was fine for TOR so this doesn't really worry me. I just hope that we can use the mouse wheel to change from first to third person perspective as we can in TOR and almost all MMOs.

TESO currently has no first person.