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Recap of SoE Live 2014
Nanfoodle
Member LegendaryPosts: 10,617
This thread keeps getting better and better. Has lots of info and worth the 15 min read to know whats going on. Also has video of the panels. Hope this helps...
Whats your thoughts????
Comments
Hype - damned if you do, damned if you don't - drawing conclusions, EQ Next is a ways off, that's going to be the bread and butter game, but in the mean time they didn't want to overdo expectations for ps2 and h1z1.
Even though SOE live felt invisible this year, they handled it the right way, building expectations that one can not deliver upon is a recipe for disaster.
In the meantime .... Enjoy Landmark, enjoy ps2, enjoy EQ and EQ2, prepare for H1Z1, and keep a circumspect eye on EQNext developments, but don't expect it anytime soon.
Ya most of the filler was just a pain to watch.
SoE promised info on Storybricks soon because of how bad the audio was in the only recording of that panel. Im really looking forward to that.
Im playing EQ2, so I am so excited for the expansion =-)
H1Z1, EQN and PS2 are all on the same engine. H1Z1 is as far a long as it is because of this. A lot of tech was taken from PS2 to make H1Z1 work. Like vehicles just needed dressing as the core of how they work is already there. This maybe the fastest MMO made to date lol
I didnt think they would have a demo of EQN, I was shocked to see a Darkelf city made from players designs. But I am still upset from last year being told they would have a work game at SoE Live 2013. IMO, there also was not enough about EQN this year but I am happy for what we got.
I just want to mention: I think that this is going to be the future of game development. Licensing an engine and using it to build different games is great - but building your own engine with the versatility to reuse assets and functionality already programmed into it is going to be huge. I think we will see more and more studios develop their own engine and then lay over different types of games on top of it. I know there has been a lot of talk before about Blizzards Titan being just that: a platform for other games to be spawned off of and not JUST a game itself.
The other good thing about this is if people can spend less money developing games, they can afford to take more risks with their games. If you can spin up an MMO with all these different features over the course of a year with a smaller team, it's a lot less of a hit than a 100 mil budget AAA MMO. If your sub-game tanks, so what - you still have your cash cow or bundle of other games able to absorb the hit and you have learned something new going forward.
On the flip side, this may also introduce a push for quicker development cycles and less time "refining" the game. That could lead to more sub-par products, and "alpha" games being released as full products.
I hope that gaming starts to go the way of Hollywood where people can write "scripts" and submit them as movie ideas and potentially get noticed - and then have that game get developed. I'm sure there are a lot more people out there that can conceptualize a solid video game than there are people who can actually do the programming work behind the scenes. More games could be bad, but who knows how it could turn out.
Future? Most studios have been doing that for years. Even in the MMO world.
I think you're misunderstanding what I'm getting at - what Studios do you know of that have been doing this for years? Just curious, as I don't know of any that are doing it quite to this extent.
You said that re-using an in-house engine for various games was the way of the future, right? I said it was already working like that. Most studios just improve their internal engine based on their needs or even keep on licensing the same engine because all their in-house tools works with that specific engine. In fact, even if a studio call an engine version X or gives it a new name, they probably didn't start it from scratch*.
When I worked in a small gaming company (early 2000) that makes games for the systems you find in airplanes, they had a single engine for all the games and it was actually from another company they split from.
And you don't know any that do it to this extent, because few studios are making 3 games at the same time. EA is doing it right now, all their studios can either use the Frostbite or the sport game engine for their games.
If you want past example, the Infinity Engine comes to mind (BioWare/Black Isle, Baldur's Gate series, Icewind Dale series and Planescape Torment). It spammed 5 games over 4 years and a lots of assets was re-used over each others. BioWare is also very good at reusing mo-capped animations between games regardless of engine. For Example, SWTOR Consular/Inquisitor lightsaber staff running animation is the same has DA2 mage staff running animation.
*Using the precedent example, BioWare took the Infinity Engine and made the Aurora engine with it. After that the Aurora engine became the Eclipse engine (I don't know if it had another name in-between Aurora and Eclipse ). You can tell it all started from the Infinity Engine because they all still use tlk files and an override folder.
He is talking about assets built in the same engine. Like a car in one game can be dressed a little different and now it a tank. Shotgun in H1Z1 can be brought over from PS2 with a new skin. Need a dragon in PS2, take one from EQN and add a new skin and some cannons on its back and now you have new content.
If you want like to read about EQN please visit
http://www.eqnextguide.com/