New MMORPG?

[R041]

It's waaaay more than just "good graphics", it literally makes developing major content like an MMO much easier and smoother, allowing the team to be more creative and devote time and energy to innovation in gameplay and new ideas, unlike being limited to the same formula in FF14...

I work in UE5 and the things you mention studios already had solutions for, or other engines did natively. Nanite and Lumen have a very long road before they're usable with 60FPS and smooth camera panning in live games.

Nanite: Extremely large file sizes, you don't want my zbrush file directly in UE. Restricted to static meshes. We've almost always been able to auto-LoD. Shader restrictions. My team is not using this.

Lumen: Beautiful, amazing in theory. Really frustrating, laggy, and slow to update in practice. It relies on hybrid screenspace that creates way too many ghosting effects on the screen when you pan from a bright to a dark area or vice versa. Maybe we'll be ready for this in 5 years.

World Partition: Most engines have this, UE had plugins for this, and Unity has this. (I've worked on 400 chunk worlds before. Not fun)

1 file per actor: Nice in theory, but we usually just prefab different instances out and assign scenes anyway. 2 people working on 1 map is very complicated which is one reason to have partitions. 1 person accidentally touches the splatmap, or something that can't split when they weren't supposed to and it explodes. I'm less worried about the actor placement, when I typically don't want 2 people in the same scene anyway. Also assigning scenes is easier than assigning zones to someone. "Okay, just.. Don't place actors past this river and we'll be fine" this also explodes version control.

Oh, and if it's an MMO - It's going to have a lot of server side instanced data. So that means dev in client will be placing stuff, not in engine. We used a tool that could transfer the coord/properties of prefabs from scene over to the live server, but that's different.

We're already at a place where MMO dev should hypothetically be easy, but 'MMO' is complicated because server zones, data storage/fetch/security is complicated at large scale. Not because it's difficult to sculpt and LoD a rock.

But you are mostly right, that the dev pipeline is getting WAY better. Just don't really expect this team to give us more for less. When they know they can give us more for more, like how the real world works. :/

Yoshi prob looks at new pipelines and goes "Okay, so we can pump out 2x more creatures? Awesome. Split that time between this and this project." not "Okay so let's add 2x more creatures to 1 game for the same price as before"

That's why when people talk about in the graphics overhaul, how we can hypothetically have more objects and density per scene.. Most of us look at it and understand that it really doesn't matter, because that usually just means they can squeeze more out for less in dev. Not give us more overall.