I see what you're saying mate.

Obviously I can't speak for ZOS, but if they wanted to license an engine rather than create one, maybe they felt the hero engine was the best to go for.

Look at gamebyro for oblivion. It was able to be upgradable for Fallout 3 and did things that were great. Again it was used for NV and Obsidian were able to do some great things with it. Things like crafting and weapon mods, survival and cooking etc.

Until we see gameplay, we can't be sure that ZOS hasn't done some great things with hero engine. Just a waiting game for us now.

Or you played TESO and you know the engine will not fit, or you have the engine and you tested it deeply ( including modifications available for a project of this size)... OR ... you are just speculating and have no idea of what are you talking.

I know for a fact the engine will not fit because the engine is not DESIGNED to fit.

Essentially, the reason I know that a custom engine will be better is because that custom engine will be designed from the ground up to work with TES:O, whereas the Hero Engine is designed to create an average MMO - they now have to modify an already built engine to get it to do what they want.

Just want to toss it out there. SWTOR was using an incomplete version of the Hero engine that they tweaked with their own in house tools after getting it. TESO will have been made with a better and stronger Hero Engine that is complete. It also will have been tweaked by the Zenimax Online devs to better fit their vision. Besides multiple things can be done with one engine in different types of games.

Exactly, like Unreal. Mirrors Edge, Gears, Shadow Complex, even Infinity Blade was made using Unreal.

^^this person gets it!

And Skyrim's Creation Kit was technically built upon a highly modified Gamebryo as well.

However, engines do possess limitations. Unreal, Cryengine and so forth are ubiquitous because they offer a veritable assorted chocolate box of high end options. I've only ever bothered with a bit of amateur UDK and CK in my time, but I do use 3D animation software professionally and I suppose to anyone else familiar with that technology, the difference might be like the difference between Maya with Mental- or V-Ray versus Rhino or some other, more specific toolset that doesn't offer quite the range of possibilities but does what it needs to do very efficiently. That Hero Engine could allow for tesselation, caustics and global illumination I very much doubt, but I imagine it's a tight software package for what it's designed to do.

But to get to the point: adding something like, say, photo-realistic water or particle cloud simulations with dynamic light, or moving vegetation, might be difficult owing to the architecture of the software.

You'd think the OP has played the game

They have been developing this game since 2006. What's to say they are not also using the incomplete HERO engine SWTOR started with? Also, why wouldn't they just use GameBryo engine like Skyrim? DAoC used GameBryo as well. Over 6 years of development certainly should have created a better engine than just HERO. It just looks goofy and awful. One of my biggest fears is the game won't be dark or gritty enough as an Elder Scrolls game. From those pics (especially the one where the two guys are standing in a shop) the people just look like HeMan.

The answer to this is so obvious it could slap you in the face. Gamebryo engine is old as dirt and TES fans have been complaining about it for years and years now.

They started TESO before Skyrim, and Skyrim still uses a heavily modified Gamebryo engine - that's all the Creation Engine is. So no, that's not the reason. The answer that is slapping people in the face is that Gamebryo can't cope with hundreds of actors on screen simultaneously. Theoretically, the Hero Engine can. Theoretically.

Skyrim looks fine to me.

I would much prefer a modified Gamebyro to a modified HERO, and I am one of the people complaining about Gamebyro.

I would prefer it because it means that I'm getting a singleplayer RPG experience modified for a MMO (what my perfect TES:O would be) instead of a modified MMO experience to fit a TES game.

Yes that is EXACTLY the reason, and that's also the reason Skyrim still has all the crappy engine bugs from Oblivion and why so many people complained about the engine and wished they had actually made a new one.


I think they should have made their own engine, but that takes a lot of time and resources.

HERO engine isn't exactly new either, but it is newer than Gamebyro. Gamebyro has been used and worked in MMOs before.

Hero engine is terrible can barely manage 20+ players on screen.

Like i said, im not particularly arguing for Hero Engine, i wish they had made their own engine.


That being said i think they could turn it into something great. Yes a turd CAN be polished into a treasure, its been proven, just look as some of the absolute trash made with Gamebryo engine, then look at the treasure we call Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim.

Correction: SWTOR is terrible and can barely manage 20+ players on screen. Hero engine, used correctly, can support 100s.

And Civilizations : IV. That was a great game.

It's possible for networking to work in Gamebryo, and I think it would be much more TES-like if it uses Gamebryo instead of a generic, pretty bad, hero engine.