[Mizuki]

I don't know enough about game engines for this question. If they were able to release an expansion could they use Unreal Engine 4 or would that be too much work?

[gunner429]

That would depend solely on BnS player base at the time as well as the size of the expansion.

[Mizuki]

I see, so it has more to do with how popular the game is instead of the technical aspects

[Ghastly]

I'm thinking it depends on how easy/hard it would be for most B&S players to upgrade/buy computers good enough to run UE4.

But ultimately it depends on how good the game does and its population.

[Notturno]

This is coming from someone with limited programming knowledge, so take it for what you will.

Blade & Soul is developed using Unreal Engine 3, which is basically a pre-made framework developers can license so they don't have to create a whole bunch of technology for their game. Unreal Engine basically comes with software to handle everything you need to create a game; art, sound, animations, artificial intelligence, scripting, et cetera. It saves a ton of time developing a game, because you can focus exclusively on developing game assets, rather than doing an engine before hand to handle all of those assets. When you choose an engine to develop your game on, you are basically stuck using that engine for the lifetime of that game. You can't develop the game on Unreal Engine 3, then go ahead and say, "I want to do an expansion using Unity Engine." The thing is, you need to port all of your assets for the original game into that new engine if you want to use it. You cannot simultaneously use two engines for one game, that doesn't make sense.

Here's where the speculation comes in.

The thing is, the hop from Unreal Engine 3 to Unreal Engine 4 is massive; there's so much new technology and content, it's a huge generational shift in game technology. Really, you should check out what it's capable of. I couldn't find anything that talks about porting games from one Unreal Engine version to another. Obviously inter-engine updates that improve functionality of the core engine (read: patches), do not interfere with your game running on an engine. Though I would imagine that the massive amount of changes in Unreal Engine 4 wouldn't lend itself well to easily porting games from Unreal Engine 3 to 4. I would guess that it would be easier since they are similarly structured engines, but I'm sure it's still a massive headache. Besides, it isn't really worth porting a game that is already released and profitable into a new engine, the lifespan for MMORPGs just aren't long enough to justify the development cost.

Point being, Blade & Soul is already a finished game, it's just being localized. It doesn't make sense to port it to a new engine; the costs would be too high, and the gains are not significant enough to justify it. Though, I may be full of it and it may be easy to port games from 3 to 4. Either way, I think you will likely see future NCsoft titles developed on Unreal Engine 4, but not this game.

This post has been edited by Notturno: Nov 24, 2012 - 1:05 PM

[Mizuki]

Ghastly, on Nov 24, 2012 - 1:02 PM, said:

I'm thinking it depends on how easy/hard it would be for most B&S players to upgrade/buy computers good enough to run UE4.

But ultimately it depends on how good the game does and its population.

Yea that's true, i'm not sure how big of a jump it is from UE3 to UE4

Notturno, on Nov 24, 2012 - 1:03 PM, said:

This is coming from someone with limited programming knowledge, so take it for what you will.

Blade & Soul is developed using Unreal Engine 3, which is basically a pre-made framework developers can license so they don't have to create a whole bunch of technology for their game. Unreal Engine basically comes with software to handle everything you need to create a game; art, sound, animations, artificial intelligence, scripting, et cetera. It saves a ton of time developing a game, because you can focus exclusively on developing game assets, rather than doing an engine before hand to handle all of those assets. When you choose an engine to develop your game on, you are basically stuck using that engine for the lifetime of that game. You can't develop the game on Unreal Engine 3, then go ahead and say, "I want to do an expansion using Unity Engine." The thing is, you need to port all of your assets for the original game into that new engine if you want to use it. You cannot simultaneously use two engines for one game, that doesn't make sense.

Here's where the speculation comes in.

The thing is, the hop from Unreal Engine 3 to Unreal Engine 4 is massive; there's so much new technology and content, it's a huge generational shift in game technology. Really, you should check out what it's capable of. I couldn't find anything that talks about porting games from one Unreal Engine version to another. Obviously inter-engine updates that improve functionality of the core engine (read: patches), do not interfere with your game running on an engine. Though I would imagine that the massive amount of changes in Unreal Engine 4 wouldn't lend itself well to easily porting games from Unreal Engine 3 to 4. I would guess that it would be easier since they are similarly structured engines, but I'm sure it's still a massive headache. Besides, it isn't really worth porting a game that is already released and profitable into a new engine, the lifespan for MMORPGs just aren't long enough to justify the development cost.

Point being, Blade & Soul is already a finished game, it's just being localized. It doesn't make sense to port it to a new engine; the costs would be too high, and the gains are not significant enough to justify it. Though, I may be full of it and it may be easy to port games from 3 to 4. Either way, I think you will likely see future NCsoft titles developed on Unreal Engine 4, but not this game.

Holy crap that engine is intense, I didn't know it was THAT detailed. If they were to use UE4 it would be for a Blade and Soul 2 probably, I think computing wise there's a huge gap with current pcs

Thanks for the explanation

This post has been edited by Mizuki: Nov 24, 2012 - 1:10 PM

[JemL]

yes, it is possible

[Haneul]

Very interesting topic... and really nice answer Notturno :) can't wait to play an unreal engine 4 based game xP

[Vile Samael]

I don't really think that it'd be worth their effort to port BnS to UE4. It'd probably be easier for them to, like you said, make a BnS 2 with the engine. It might be too soon to be thinking about that, though. Kinda reminds me of people on Mabinogi wanting devCAT to just patch Mabinogi II's new engine into the game. It was like... hey, that won't work at all. Mabinogi's too old for that. But that's not really comparable to just UE3 to UE4, I guess. I don't know anything about how difficult it'd be, but I'm guessing it'd be a bit too difficult to be worth it.

[Duckimus Maxmimus]

I work with UE3 for modding/indie/mapping purposes I have to say that I love the engine, and I can't wait for UE4.
There is no way in hell they will create an UE4 expansion. To be able to create a MMO like B&S, or Tera on this engine they had to do some serious work modifying it.
This isn't the UE3 that was shipped with your UT3 black edition game, so apart from moving over all their assets, they would also have to learn UE4, and redo all the modifications to it, as far as possible, and needed. They might as well make a new game, which might actually take less time.

A bit too much work is a gross understatement :P

This post has been edited by Duckimus Maxmimus: Dec 08, 2012 - 12:46 AM

[Tashigi]

It better have pandas in it!