What if they used the Unreal Engine 3 ?

[Clattuc]

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if they had taken 20% of the OLD REPUBLIC budget and used it to reboot GALAXIES with the UE3 engine, hires graphics and more planets/storylines. I kind of think it would kick this title around the block. But no sense dwelling on all that...

[Sunseeker]

Visual appearance is nice, but it's not going to make the game if the content just isn't up to par.

[karumayu]

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if they had taken 20% of the OLD REPUBLIC budget and used it to reboot GALAXIES with the UE3 engine, hires graphics and more planets/storylines. I kind of think it would kick this title around the block. But no sense dwelling on all that...

I think people are under estimating the amount of people who bought this game due to KoTOR and the amount of people who prefer theme park MMOs.

[Deleted]

Well, all I know is that we had the chance to get a much better Star Wars MMORPG (for crying out loud, it's star wars) and they totally blew it on various levels, including the engine.

Overpowering it's non existant optimizations with sheer computing power is hardly efficient, not to mention it pisses me off needing super hardware to make up for shitty engines.

[Clattuc]

I think people are under estimating the amount of people who bought this game due to KoTOR and the amount of people who prefer theme park MMOs.

I wouldn't dream of underestimating the number of people who bought the box for reasons like KOTOR love. In fact that's exactly why the game oversold at launch. But buying the box and staying with the game are two different things, as we saw and we're still seeing.

[Snorkle]

You look at those who left. Why not look at those who stayed?

[Clattuc]

You look at those who left. Why not look at those who stayed?

An interesting question. You should forward it to EA Labels president Frank Gibeau, who said "The message from players exiting the game is clear – 40 percent say they were turned off by the monthly subscription and many indicated they would come back if we offered a free-to-play model." Why would EA waste time "looking at those who left"? Because what makes people leave can determine the future course of the game.

Concurrents took another hit this week, partly from GW2, partly from F2P anticipation, but I hope they hold steady from here.

[RoninaThorstone]

Concurrents took another hit this week, partly from GW2, partly from F2P anticipation, but I hope they hold steady from here.

Also, anytime you announce a new patch as "soon" you see a drop in concurrent until the patch is about to come out. People don't like grinding gear they are going to replace in a month.

[Snorkle]

An interesting question. You should forward it to EA Labels president Frank Gibeau, who said "The message from players exiting the game is clear – 40 percent say they were turned off by the monthly subscription and many indicated they would come back if we offered a free-to-play model." Why would EA waste time "looking at those who left"? Because what makes people leave can determine the future course of the game.

Concurrents took another hit this week, partly from GW2, partly from F2P anticipation, but I hope they hold steady from here.

Unfortunately, like every other game around, computer or not, it is next to impossible to get an opinion across to the developers.

[Elite Peon]

SWTOR would have been soooooo much better with the UE3 . Major reasons being that all the graphics cards compainies and a lot of programming talent have been working with that game engine for years it would have saved everyone a lot of time and effort . However they spent way to much time and budget on the cinematics instead of a meaningful and playable endgame ...One really cool cinematic would have been enough why did they need like 4-5 O.o

[RoninaThorstone]

SWTOR would have been soooooo much better with the UE3 . Major reasons being that all the graphics cards compainies and a lot of programming talent have been working with that game engine for years it would have saved everyone a lot of time and effort . However they spent way to much time and budget on the cinematics instead of a meaningful and playable endgame ...One really cool cinematic would have been enough why did they need like 4-5 O.o

pretty sure they outsourced the creation of the cinematics to another studio... so not sure that would have changed much...

[UncleThursday]

DCUO also use the UE3. Now, on the PS3, it's not that great looking as an MMO engine. Maybe on PCs it looks better, but I have never played it on a PC, just my PS3. I've never played Tera or any other MMO that uses it, besides DCUO, either. So I can't comment on them.

It's not that TOR looks bad, though. But there are inconsistencies when used on different computers of right around the same power. On the PC I play on, for example, it is very smooth and nice looking at pretty much max settings.

UE3 is a very scalable engine, though. And, contrary to popular belief thrown at it, not every game that uses it looks exactly the same as every other UE3 game. True, most Epic games look similar, but that's Epic's look; not the engine itself.

And UE4 is looking to be amazing, provided Tim Sweeny can get it optimized and doing everything he wants.

[Kryss]

Also UE is Mac compatible, which HeroEngine was promised to become but was never delivered by its creators. A lot of my guildies on swtor, fed up with having to bootcamp to play, went back to WoW, progressively dragging with them PC using friends.
Thought not a gaming platform per se, Macs are perfectly able to run AAA MMOs like WoW or EVE, currently account for nearly 15% of PCs in north america and I know of many WoW players who don't play other games and were definitely on the market for another Mac-compatible MMO in the world of Star Wars. Our WoW guild has maybe 20% of Mac using players and many of them played SWTOR a few months before becoming fed up with rebooting, having to keep a Windows partition around and lose 50 Gb of HD space for this sole purpose. Having used an OpenGL compatible engine in the first place would have kept those players (and their PC using friends) – among them some great officers – in SWTOR.

HeroEngine was a poor choice in the first place, both because it can't handle well large groups of players and because it let down a big chunk of potential players.