woqqa said:
I wasn"t being sarcastic...just throwing out an old question in the vain hope of getting an answer. (yes, I know he wasn"t likely to be able to answer it, but it never hurts to try...the whole VG engine thing is something I"m really interested in)
Also, hi Kendrik.
/wave
Oh, I can answer that one, but it"s pretty much the same answer Brad"s given dozens of times.
Perhaps I can put a bit more perspective on it though. EQ1 had no such expandibility, starting in Velious we had a full time engine guy trying to upgrade the Pyrotechnics engine (which 989 had already licensed for Tanarus). Some of you might remember the DX7/8 switch during that time period.
Then during Luclin development period the same guy and others tried to stretch the engine even more, with mostly mixed results. The delays waiting on this engine upgrade had a
HUGEimpact on Luclin"s development, and very little of it was positive.
On top of that EQ2, Planetside, Sojourn and SWG went with ground-up new in-house engines, and the results and costs of going that route were less than impressive in 2002. EQ2"s team basically built two engines, scrapping the first and starting from scratch on what ended up being the release engine, and while SWG"s engine had a better track record, it was still costly. Coders cost a lot more than artists or designers, most of a MMO"s budget is on manpower, so building an engine in-house assuredly required more coders and coder-hours than licensing one, and with
no guaranteeof good results.
So the idea of using a well built, proven engine from one of the most respected tech/game companies in the industry had serious appeal. Combine that with the facts that our lead programmer had a good relationship with Sweeny, Epic was eager to expand into the MMO market (and cut a good deal), and MSFT was excited about the engine as well, as it had always been a showcase of what a modern DX title could look like, and perhaps you can see where using the Unreal engine was a slam-dunk compared to our other alternatives in 2002.
The idea was to hit the ground running, have the awesome technical support of Sweeny and others when needed, no need to totally reinvent the wheel, and have the knowledge that Epic was going to continue to evolve the Unreal engine and wasn"t going anywhere (the Pyro engine company folded before EQ shipped if I recall the timeline correctly).
In addition to that, there were some mandates about the game...it had to be large, it had to be seamless, it had to have the fidelity to recreate Keith"s concepts in digital form, and it had to last the lifetime of the game.
Seamless/high fidelity/long lifetime, combined with Unreal"s already more than moderate tech requirements with the bells and whistles turned on had a large impact on system specs.
We were aware of that pretty early on, but we were also aware of what was going on in the hardware side of things, and felt that by the time we shipped, G70"s and R5xx cards would be mid-grade or even low-end parts, and we had hoped that constant optimizing, combined with cheap graphics muscle, decreasing RAM costs and increasing RAM sizes in machines would result in a game that was playable on a lower end machine at release, and drop dead gorgeous on a high end machine.
Icing on the cake was how well EQ1/Quake/Unreal/Tomb Raider, etc had converted 2d users to costly at the time 3d cards and RAM upgrades. This trend didn"t look to be abating, and 6 month product cycles from ATI and Nvidia and 1 year cycles from Intel and AMD sure seemed to bear that theory out.
Those predictions weren"t too far off the mark, btw, but we also made the assumption that people would be UPGRADING, because as enthusiasts, we certainly were constantly doing so. And once again, we weren"t aiming for the "mythical million subscriber MMO". WoW was just forum talk and speculation in 2002.
You may have noticed the heavy use of "we" in the above. Why? Because it was more than one person making those decisions and/or vetting them, the entire founding team subscribed to them, so while it might be trendy to put all the onus on Brad, he didn"t make the decision in a vacuum.
And hindsight is 20/20 when playing the "WoW" card and citing the relationship of their sub numbers and low system reqs.
