Bioware Licenses Unreal Engine 3.0 (tm)

[Fodder]

Which one of their upcoming games will use UE3, Dragon Age?

Their third original IP, so note Jade Empire, not Dragon Age, but something else completely new.

It's just that DS's "tiles" were smaller than NwN allowing you to have finer control over your level (and less repetitiveness).

Though as a side effect of that, I found the DS editor a real pain to use.

 

[Ostsol]

Yeah, that's a good point. If they're using the UE3 engine for a NWN-type game,there would be no reason to have that limitation, since the UE3 engine will take care of all those caching and occlusion issues.

Indeed! Given that engine, I imagine a sort of portal based system (but not BSP) using occlusion queries.

There's still other reasons to separate indoor and ourdoor maps, though. If a particular indoor environment in especially complex, it's going to take a heap of memory. The separation allows the memory requirements to stay low and the developers can avoid worrying about a dynamic loading scheme. That said, the Gothic series managed to do extremely well with a minimal number of maps. I think the first game had a grand total 3 maps.

Now, the question is: is it feasible to have a modular environment while at the same time offering "True 3D" for motion?

Even the UE2.0 allows that. A vast majority of the staircases in UT2003 and UT2004 are static meshes. Morrowind's indoor environments and dungeons are 100% modular (though it's somewhat glitchy IMHO).

Of course, we do have to accept that it's really not necessary for the game that is to use UE3 to be modular. Is it even confirmed that it'll be an RPG, though? Remember that Bioware was the developer of MDK2 games (a great action game). It's possible that Bioware decided to license as a way to get back into the 3D action game market

That's true. The interview seemed to indicate to me that it was going to be an RPG, but thinking further along those lines, that genre label doesn't mean much. Look at the Deus Ex series, for example.

Personally, my dream is to see a Shattered Steel sequel as an action-RPG combining mech-, vehicle-, and FPS-style action. For the RPG-aspect, they could follow Deus Ex 2's example and do away with all stats and skills and keep to the core of role-playing: character interactions.

(hell, maybe they managed to wrestle the MDK license from Interplay??).

Heheh. . . Yeah, Bethesda didn't seem to have any problem obtaining the Fallout license, so why not?

 

[KimB]

Now, the question is: is it feasible to have a modular environment while at the same time offering "True 3D" for motion?

Even the UE2.0 allows that. A vast majority of the staircases in UT2003 and UT2004 are static meshes. Morrowind's indoor environments and dungeons are 100% modular (though it's somewhat glitchy IMHO).

That's not quite what I mean. NWN was built around making it very easy to build new maps. It's not nearly that easy to make a map in the Unreal engine or in Morrowind. What I'm asking is whether or not the simplifications that Bioware would probably make to improve the level editing would result in a simpler set of available world object configurations.

This is all if, of course, they're planning on a modular multiplayer RPG, not a single player RPG.