Thread: Thinking about 1.0

Originally Posted by Wildheaven182

No, I think the game engine is pretty clearly a root of many problems. It's clear how difficult it was to work with crystal tools and they didnt replace Crystal Tools with Luminous engine for ARR because Crystal Tools was good.

You have to look at in a historical context. They started to make the game ~2005. Which engine, you could licence at that time would be way better than Crystal Tools for a MMORPG? Propably there was not a single one. So they decided to make an own engine. Other studios like Bioware or Zenimax Online used the HeroEngine. But they had to modify it heavily to make it work. And their MMORPGs still had really huge performance problems.

And the Luminous engine was not available in 2005.

Originally Posted by Wildheaven182

I shouldnt be surprised every breath you take on the internet you have to explain the concept of nuance. No Im not saying the engine was the source of all problems, it wasnt. And I agree, bad design decisions were the root of the creative and gameplay problems.
The engine and their backend programming was based heavily on scripts, for everything. From what Im told scripts are useful for automating small repetitive tasks but far from ideal for any longer processes, causing heavy cpu load or something. Bad performance.

FF14 1.0 would propably still fail with a very good engine.


Cheers

Originally Posted by Larirawiel

You have to look at in a historical context. They started to make the game ~2005. Which engine, you could licence at that time would be way better than Crystal Tools for a MMORPG? Propably there was not a single one. So they decided to make an own engine. Other studios like Bioware or Zenimax Online used the HeroEngine. But they had to modify it heavily to make it work. And their MMORPGs still had really huge performance problems.

Lineage II (released 2003) was using Unreal Engine 2, and it worked quite well, even with the large open world and 100+ player sieges. The engine's successor, Unreal Engine 3, was also available in March 2004.

Originally Posted by Larirawiel

Yes, but if you look at the Lineage 2 screenshots from that time, it looks more like Final Fantasy 11 Online. Perhaps the engine was not good enough for a high graphical fidelity and open world with a high number of players.

Because FFXI (May 2002) and L2 (October 2003) were the same generation of MMORPGs. FFXIV would have UE3 available, a significant graphical upgrade.

Originally Posted by Larirawiel

You have to look at in a historical context. They started to make the game ~2005. Which engine, you could licence at that time would be way better than Crystal Tools for a MMORPG? Propably there was not a single one. So they decided to make an own engine. Other studios like Bioware or Zenimax Online used the HeroEngine. But they had to modify it heavily to make it work. And their MMORPGs still had really huge performance problems.

And the Luminous engine was not available in 2005.



FF14 1.0 would propably still fail with a very good engine.


Cheers

It would have been better for them to at least commission the development of a game engine by people who actually make game engines, or recruit for it. Theyd just have to contract for full ownership which would have been more expensive and harder to negotiate. It's 1000% different from game programming. And all squex did at the time was pull their top programmers from other projects, hurting other games at the time, according to the interviews.

Btw the lead guy on 1.0 was moved down to the level design team.

I think we call that nostalgia.