Hero Engine gets special trees - Editorial

For years the Hero Engine has been the go-to choice for MMO developers. Why? Because it works in the most rudimentary sense. A new edition is going to feature realistic trees. We’ll go over what some of this means for the industry. This is an editorial because I for one, am sick of the disaster that Hero Engine has brought to the industry.

How many games use Hero Engine?

Over 5,000 games use it. Why? Because it is inexpensive and easy. It has a reputation for being terribly buggy, as we saw with Star Wars the Old Republic. It is highly overused for a variety of buggy MMOs. It will also be used in the upcoming Elder Scrolls Online.

What is SpeedTree in the hero engine?

Hero Engine 2 will be a new edition with SpeedTree integrated. Basically this is a  third party product that will make trees look better. This is something that the makers wanted to tout. You might want to fix the engine before you fix the trees, Idea Fabrik.

Why is the Hero Engine so dangerous to the industry?

The Hero Engine and Hero Cloud allow people to make MMOs with minimal time and cost. This has a variety of negative implications for the industry. Let us go down each one:

• Homogenization of games: You get to see the same MMO done in a slightly different way hundreds to thousands of times.
• The same bugs across each game: SWTOR used a very outdated version of the engine, but things still aren’t perfect. In our opinion, we have not seen the engine become acceptable.
• Stifling of other engines: When this one is on top, that keeps others out of the spotlight. There is not unlimited room at the top in any sort of business.
• AAA titles use this over creating their own engine: As a result their MMO products end up worse than their base ones. Look at the Old Republic compared to the old Knights games. The Elder Scrolls Online will probably suffer the same fate.

The Starbucks conundrum

Starbucks has horrible coffee compared to local coffeehouses by and large. It’s bad, it’s tasteless and they are incredibly popular. This is because they are convenient. They are everywhere and are popular. The Hero Engine is much like Starbucks. It delivers a poor performance but is everywhere. People use it because it is the biggest game in any town. In many ways this is just us doing it to ourselves. I have no solution for breaking this cycle but it needs to be broken. With the emerging market of Brazil eating up a large number of low-quality games there seems to be no end in sight. That is not to say that an emerging market is a bad thing. It is neutral, but it has emerged at a bad time for gaming.

Is the Hero Engine all bad?

Many of us have played some games without knowing they are on the Hero Engine. Did we hate them all? No. But we would argue that is because of the efforts of the team in spite of the engine. They are also working on improving it. It could one day be a decent engine. However it isn’t there yet, and it caused  another problem.

The real final problem the Hero Engine caused

None of that ignores the fact that they have undeserved success. They rode giving a buggy engine to Bioware into a successful business. That is what really annoys me, when the industry is full of those less successful who could probably have done a better job.

Fortunately some people care

We are far from the only people to dislike the Hero Engine. There is an underlying group of people who are tired of it. If you are tired of this homogenization of games and the death of originality, tell them about it. A few special trees aren’t going to solve an inherently flawed concept.